The National Health Service (NHS) Five-Year Forward View delivery plan to tackle early diagnosis and treatment of cancer is still failing cancer patients, according to the U.K. Royal College of Radiologists (RCR).
The RCR applauds the ambition of the updated plans but remains "saddened by the lack of detail about delivery," RCR President Dr. Nicola Strickland noted in a statement.
"While the plans appear to address the need to speed up and expand diagnostic capacity and promise continued investment in radiotherapy services, they will still fail to enable the outcomes envisaged by the English Cancer Strategy as the workforce needed to deliver them has not been funded," she said.
Rapid diagnostic and assessment centers are admirable, but they are unlikely to lead to patients getting their test results any sooner, the RCR stated. Almost a quarter of a million patients are already waiting more than a month for the results of scans in the U.K. due to a severe shortage of radiologists, it added.
The NHS advocated 35 additional 35 training places for clinical radiologists, but there are more than 460 consultant radiologist vacancies.
"The absence of detail on the implementation of these plans is disappointing," Strickland concluded. "Patients and doctors were hoping to see a meaningful and serious commitment to meeting the ambitions of the Cancer Strategy. These plans fail to deliver this."
![Overview of the study design. (A) The fully automated deep learning framework was developed to estimate body composition (BC) (defined as subcutaneous adipose tissue [SAT] in liters; visceral adipose tissue [VAT] in liters; skeletal muscle [SM] in liters; SM fat fraction [SMFF] as a percentage; and intramuscular adipose tissue [IMAT] in deciliters) from MRI. The fully automated framework comprised one model (model 1) to quantify different BC measures (SAT, VAT, SM, SMFF, and IMAT) as three-dimensional (3D) measures from whole-body MRI scans. The second model (model 2) was trained to identify standardized anatomic landmarks along the craniocaudal body axis (z coordinate field), which allowed for subdividing the whole-body measures into different subregions typically examined on clinical routine MRI scans (chest, abdomen, and pelvis). (B) BC was quantified from whole-body MRI in over 66,000 individuals from two large population-based cohort studies, the UK Biobank (UKB) (36,317 individuals) and the German National Cohort (NAKO) (30,291 individuals). Bar graphs show age distribution by sex and cohort. BMI = body mass index. (C) After the performance assessment of the fully automated framework, the change in BC measures, distributions, and profiles across age decades were investigated. Age-, sex-, and height-adjusted body composition reference curves were calculated and made publicly available in a web-based z-score calculator (https://circ-ml.github.io).](https://img.auntminnieeurope.com/mindful/smg/workspaces/default/uploads/2026/05/body-comp.XgAjTfPj1W.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&dpr=2&fit=crop&h=167&q=70&w=250)
