The 'scanxiety' crisis is holding back the NHS

The scan is done, you’re told that the results will go to your doctor and then - nothing. Days stretch into weeks. You call the hospital and begin to wonder whether no news is good news, or whether the silence means something far worse. This is scanxiety: the anxiety-inducing limbo of waiting for scan results.

Last year, nearly a million imaging studies in England were not reported within the one-month target timeframe. That’s hundreds of thousands of people - cancer patients, trauma cases, mothers and fathers and children - left in the dark while the system they rely on struggles to keep pace with demand.

This is not just an inconvenience, it’s clogging the whole system and delaying the start of treatments. It’s also causing patients untold anxieties and stress, potentially undermining patient trust across the NHS.

I think about Liz, who was diagnosed with secondary breast cancer last November.

She saw first-hand the way that information - or the lack of it - was handled throughout. The MRI that first flagged concerns about her liver was never directly communicated to her. She only found out months later, when her breast surgeon mentioned in passing that a multidisciplinary team meeting had raised a question mark. A CT scan result was shared only incidentally, by a clinician who happened to have seen it during an unrelated procedure. On more than one occasion, she has walked into a consultation only to be asked: "So, what have you been told?"

It all culminated the night before one biopsy, her blood pressure spiked to 220 over 130 - a hypertensive crisis serious enough to require an overnight hospital admission. She now wears a blood pressure tracker on her wrist. Liz's experience is not an outlier. It is the logical consequence of a system still operating under rules written for a different era - one where demand was predictable, workflows were linear, and diagnosis could afford to wait. Those conditions no longer exist, but the structures built around them remain largely unchanged.

Politicians and commentators talk endlessly about A&E waiting times, GP access and surgical backlogs. Those are real and serious problems. But the scan jam sitting at the heart of the diagnostic pathway receives a fraction of the attention it deserves. Diagnosis is the valve in the system. When it's blocked, pressure builds everywhere else. Every delayed scan report feeds directly into longer waits, stalled treatment decisions and patients left without answers.

The instinct is to treat this as a workforce problem. And the numbers are stark: the UK faces a 31% shortfall in consultant radiologists, projected to reach 40% by 2028, just as imaging demand continues to grow. But framing it purely as a capacity issue misses the deeper failure. Fragmented workflows, reactive systems, and departments where quality is invisible rather than measured - these are what turn a staffing challenge into a diagnostic crisis. Existing expertise is not being matched to the right scans. Delays are spotted only after they've become backlogs. The system measures volume when it should be measuring outcomes.

This is why I founded Hexarad with three other radiologists. Not to process more scans, but because the diagnostic pathway itself needs to work differently. Every scan should reach the right subspecialist. Quality should be visible, reviewed and improved in real time. And the systems around clinicians should be intelligent enough to identify pressure points before they become crises - not after.

The NHS Scan Jam is not inevitable. It is the product of underinvestment in intelligent systems and a collective failure to treat radiology as the critical infrastructure it is.

We cannot keep asking patients like Liz to sit in silence while the system catches up. Diagnosis is the moment uncertainty ends and action begins. It unlocks every pathway that follows - and it is what every patient waiting for results deserves. When we get diagnosis right, care can begin.

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Dr Farzana Rahman is a radiologist with more than 10 years experience in the NHS. She is now the CEO and co-founder of Hexarad, which has diagnosed more than 2 million patients in partnership with the NHS.

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