Medical leaders have warned that the NHS does not currently have the 6,000 staff needed to run its promised array of new testing centres designed to speed up diagnosis of cancer and other diseases.

NHS England has promised to spend £2.3 billion setting up at least 100 community diagnostic centres by early 2025, as part of a major effort to identify life-threatening diseases such as cancer and diabetes sooner and tackle the NHS’s huge backlog of non-urgent hospital care.

The Department of Health and Social Care has confirmed in a written parliamentary answer that the centres will need an extra 3,500 radiographers to carry out diagnostics tests and 2,000 radiologists to interpret the results, as well as 500 advanced practitioners, who are senior nurses.

But groups representing the staff needed insist that the extra 6,000 specialists do not exist. The Society and College of Radiographers says that the drive to recruit the radiographers and radiologists needed to take and analyse scans and X-rays at the community diagnostic centres in England risks already-understaffed hospitals losing key staff to work there.

The Royal College of Radiologists has also warned that patients who are due to have a diagnostic test at a hospital where staff have left to work in the CDCs could face a longer wait for it, a delay to the start of their treatment and potentially a poorer outcome as a result.