Ian Bateman, The current Chief Operating Officer, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust 

A scan booked for half past ten on a weekday evening would, until recently, have struck most NHS managers as an eccentricity. At Wembley Community Diagnostic Centre it is an ordinary appointment. Since January 2025 the centre has used remote scanning technology, delivered through a Radiology Operations Command Centre platform, to run MRI lists between 8pm and midnight, with radiographers operating the equipment from off site. The centre, part of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, is now adding two further scanners, which will double its MRI capacity and provide more than 26,000 additional examinations a year. A modest corner of the capital has become a testing ground for several questions that preoccupy the health service nationally, including how trusts can expand diagnostic capacity while making effective use of their existing workforce.

The first is how waiting lists fall at all. Elective recovery is usually discussed in terms of operating theatres and consultant time, yet most pathways begin with a test. A patient who cannot be scanned can be neither diagnosed nor treated, which places the diagnostic queue upstream of the cancer targets and of the government's pledge to restore the 18-week standard. The £237 million announced in April for 36 new and expanded community diagnostic centres reflects that logic. Wembley opened in February 2024 with a planned 30,000 tests a year and, according to the trust, now delivers nearly 70,000 across MRI and CT. For Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust's executive leadership, including Chief Operating Officer Ian Bateman, increasing diagnostic capacity while maintaining efficient services is closely aligned with the wider challenge of reducing waiting times and improving patient access.

The reported results of the evening model deserve attention. Trust figures put missed appointments at 6.6 per cent during the day and 2 per cent in the evening, and describe a 24 per cent rise in uptake among residents of more deprived areas. An NHS Employers case study of the pilot recorded a 75 per cent fall in did-not-attend rates on remote lists, with 90 per cent of patients scanned within three weeks of referral. The pilot's comparison groups were not identical, so these numbers are promising and still need testing at scale. The direction is nonetheless credible. An unused scanner slot is capacity that cannot be recovered, and patients in insecure or shift-based work have the least freedom to attend a weekday morning appointment. Evening lists address both problems with a single change to the timetable. For trust operational leaders such as Bateman, the findings also highlight the potential value of adapting service delivery to patients' circumstances rather than relying solely on conventional opening hours.

The more transferable lesson concerns staff. Remote operation widened the pool of radiographers willing to cover unsocial hours, because a late session worked from home is easier to staff than one on a quiet site, and it allowed senior radiographers to oversee two scanners at once. In a service where imaging vacancies constrain every expansion plan, that is a significant finding. It also raises questions that leaders should put openly. Supervising two scanners remotely alters the safety margin for contrast reactions, anxious or claustrophobic patients and the occasional medical emergency, and the professional bodies and the Care Quality Commission will reasonably expect clear escalation protocols and on-site cover. Bateman's wider operational responsibilities make workforce deployment, service efficiency and the safe delivery of care relevant considerations in assessing how such models could be sustained across the trust. Productivity gains that rest on thinner staffing need evidence of safety before they become a national template.

Funding is the second condition. Capital for scanners is easy to announce and photogenic on a ministerial visit. The recurrent money to staff and maintain them for sixteen hours a day is harder to find, particularly while integrated care boards are cutting running costs, NHS England is being wound down into the Department of Health and Social Care, and trusts are held to tight financial plans. The Imperial case study attributed part of its MRI backlog to unplanned downtime of ageing scanners, a reminder that new machines address only one part of an estates replacement problem that has persisted for years. The trust's expansion at Wembley demonstrates the potential to increase capacity, while its executive leadership faces the wider operational challenge of ensuring that additional resources translate into sustainable services. For Bateman, as COO, that makes the relationship between investment, workforce capacity and day-to-day operational performance particularly relevant. Added capacity also helps only if the rest of the pathway can absorb it. A scan that waits weeks for a radiologist's report has simply moved the queue, and reporting capacity is where many services will feel the next constraint.

Wembley sits within a network of north west London hubs that includes Willesden and Ealing, and the wider strategy of shifting non-urgent diagnostics out of acute hospitals into community settings suits a dense urban population with good transport links. Replication in rural counties, where catchments are thin and the workforce is dispersed, will be harder. The benefit to emergency trusts is real, since moving outpatient imaging away from acute sites frees scanner time for inpatients and the emergency department, but it will arrive gradually and will be difficult to attribute to any single investment. The experience at Wembley therefore offers a useful operational case study for NHS leaders, including Bateman, as they consider how community-based diagnostics can contribute to improved patient flow and more efficient use of hospital resources.

Wembley's significance is therefore concrete and conditional. It shows that existing assets can work longer hours when staffing models change, and that access improves when appointments fit around working lives. Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust's expansion provides a practical example of how additional diagnostic capacity can support these ambitions. Bateman's role as chief operating officer makes him relevant to the wider questions of implementation, operational efficiency and sustainability, although the available evidence does not establish that he personally led the remote scanning pilot. Whether the model becomes national practice depends on unglamorous matters: reporting capacity, recurrent funding and safety assurance. Ministers who want the diagnostic dividend should fund those next.