Britain has fewer high-tech medical machines than Estonia and Turkey

Britain has fewer high-tech medical machines than Estonia and Turkey

Hospitals in Britain have fewer high-tech medical machines than those in poorer countries such as Estonia and Turkey, according to the public spending watchdog.

By Martin Beckford, Health Correspondent 12:01AM BST 30 Mar 2011

Even those units that do have MRI and CT scanners often leave them to “lie idle” for much of the time despite rising demand, the National Audit Office said.

It claims the NHS is not getting value for money out of the technology, particularly as trusts do not collaborate to buy them or try to get the best prices.

Margaret Hodge, the Labour MP who chairs the Public Accounts Committee, said: “At a time when the NHS is undergoing radical reform and has the additional challenge of making billions in savings, it is even more important that it focuses on getting the best value for money from all of its assets.”

She said the NAO report, published on Wednesday, “suggests that the NHS is not making the most of what it has got”.

“It is not getting best value from this vital, but expensive, equipment.”

The watchdog – which recently claimed that hospital consultants’ productivity had fallen even as their pay had risen – looked at hospitals’ use CT and MRI scanners that check patients for cancer and heart problems as well as Linear Accelerator (Linac) machines that deliver radiotherapy.

It found that 426 CT scanners (costing £579,000 each), 304 MRI scanners (£895,000) and 246 Linac machines (£1.4million) are now in use across the NHS in England, most of them installed in the past decade.

Yet the report added: “The UK still has fewer machines than other countries.”

The NHS in England had 6 MRI machines per million population in 2010, with figures across Britain putting the country below the Slovak Republic, Turkey, Estonia and Ireland in a league table of provision.

For CT scanners, there were 8.4 per million population, with Britain again trailing far poorer countries such as Greece (about 30) and the Czech Republic (about 15).

There were 4.8 Linac machines per million population last year in the NHS, compared with about 13 in the Slovak Republic.

About half of the machines in the NHS will need replacing over the next three years, which could cost up to £460m.

The NAO said the number of diagnostic scans carried out using these machines has risen almost threefold over the past decade, but although the workforce has also increased “shortfalls remain in capability to deliver services”.

Some units operating the machines are open for 40 hours a week and others as much as 100, but services that just open from 9 to 5 “are not always sufficient to cope with demand, and expensive equipment can lie idle for much of the week”.

As a result, in some areas patients are having to wait longer than the recommended two weeks from referral for the scans to be carried out.

Hospitals reported wide variations in the cost per scan, from £84 to £472 in MRI and from £54 to £268 in CT scans.

As a result of a lack of comparable data and collaboration between hospitals, the study said: “NHS trusts do not have the means to know if they are making best use or getting best value out of their high value equipment.

“Equally, they do not have the means to determine if they are getting value for money from purchasing or maintenance.

via Britain has fewer high-tech medical machines than Estonia and Turkey – Telegraph.