Thousands more endoscopy tests are to be made available to people in East Lancashire, helping them to spot and treat conditions ranging from cancer to reflux or ulcers more quickly.

Endoscopy tests allow healthcare professionals to see inside the body using an instrument called an endoscope. The increased number of tests will help to cut down waiting times for diagnosis and potentially-life saving treatment.

As part of a newly-approved community diagnostic centre (CDC) at Burnley General Hospital, two dedicated endoscopy rooms will be opened in Spring 2023. These will join one existing endoscopy room already offering tests to people in the area. Together they will provide up to 14,000 additional tests to patients in the two years from spring 2023.

They join a variety of diagnostics already provided at the site such as X-ray, ultrasound and MRI scans, meaning that patients can undergo a number of diagnostic tests in one appointment, helping to cut down the cost, time and carbon footprint of multiple visits.

East Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (ELHT) and NHS Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board (ICB) are receiving national funding to deliver the community diagnostic centres across the area.

Tony McDonald, executive director of integrated care, partnerships and resilience at ELHT, said: “The new Burnley CDC will play a major role in making potentially life-saving diagnostic tests more easily accessible for people in East Lancashire.

“The 14,000 additional endoscopy tests will help to bring waiting times down, so that people can get the diagnosis, and treatment if they need it, sooner.”

The Burnley CDC is one of around 160 others set to open across the UK by 2025 and is being developed to enable patients to receive a potentially life-saving diagnosis for a range of conditions such as cancer and heart and lung disease more quickly.

It will help to reduce the backlog of patients waiting for tests while also relieving pressure on NHS staff ahead of a potentially challenging winter. Patients will be referred to the centre by their GP.

The Burnley CDC is a ‘spoke’ site to a main hub opened at Rossendale Primary Healthcare Centre last year. The Rossendale hub already offers a wider range of services including blood tests.

Next year, heart and lung checks will also be offered at the Rossendale CDC as cardiology and respiratory diagnostics are added to the suite of tests on offer.

Together, the Rossendale and Burnley General Hospital CDCs are set to offer more than 86,000 additional tests to patients in the area from October 2022 to March 2025.

Three further centres have already been opened across Lancashire and South Cumbria, in Preston, Kendal and Blackpool. The sites have been selected following analysis to determine where CDCs would be most beneficial in reducing waiting lists and tackling health inequalities whilst making the best use of existing NHS estates.

Deborah Mitchell, the north west regional diagnostics lead for NHS England, said: “NHS staff across the region are working hard to bring down the waiting times for diagnostic tests, which have built up as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“Staff have led a number of different initiatives, such as the Lancashire and South Cumbria cardiac network team, which ran an ‘echo-thon’ earlier this year, with the aim of delivering an additional 800 echocardiographs over eight weekends."

The development of community diagnostic centres (CDCs) was a key recommendation of the Richard’s review on NHS diagnostics services, proposing the need to revolutionise diagnostic services to cope with the huge increase in demand, improve services and patient outcomes and, more recently, to help tackle the backlogs as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.