A call has been made to train more clinical radiologists as figures reveal the NHS spent £1.4bn to combat shortages in the past five years.

The Royal College of Radiologists (RCR) said training up just 10% more clinical radiologists per year would, after 10 years, save the NHS £100m, compared to relying on short-term fixes like outsourcing.

Dr Stephen Harden, president of the RCR, said: ‘Increasing NHS reliance on outsourcing in radiology is not sustainable, and the costs of this are spiralling out of control. The single best investment the NHS could make to reduce waiting lists is to train up more clinical radiologists.'

The RCR 2025 Clinical Radiology Workforce Census report shows the UK spent a record £362m on short-term solutions, including outsourcing, paid overtime and locums to manage excess radiology workload.

Outsourcing scans read by private teleradiology companies accounted for £241m of the total cost in 2025 – another record high, and a £25m (12%) increase on 2024. The cost of outsourcing in radiology has doubled since 2021, and is on track to nearly double again, rising to £454m, by 2030. 

In 2025, nearly 1m (940,900) scan results in England took longer than a month. This is a slight improvement on 2024 (994,633), but a poor performance against the NHS England target that no patient should wait longer than a month for scan results.  

In 2024, demand for CT and MRI scans grew by 8% but the radiology workforce only grew by 4.7%.

Almost nine in 10 (86%) radiology leaders said they were concerned that outsourcing results in lower quality reports. In addition, 90% were concerned that outsourced reports need double-checking by NHS clinical radiologists, adding to their teams' packed workloads.