Feedback Medical has secured funding of £50,000 for a further Community Diagnostic Centre (CDC) pathway pilot with the Oldham CDC, run by the Northern Care Alliance.

This follows the two pilot sites, Amersham CDC in Buckinghamshire and a pan regional pilot across Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire ICS (BOB ICS), announced on 19 December 2023. We have contracted directly with Oldham CDC using an additional award of funding locally disbursed for this purpose under NHS England’s (NHSE) CDC programme.

The contract entered into this week reflects advisory services Feedback has and continues to provide to Oldham CDC for the four-month period ended 31 March 2024 in relation to pathways development and deployment of Bleepa. On completion of the initial milestones, we will support Oldham CDC to apply for more funding from the 2024-25 NHS budget to extend the pilot with a view to installing Bleepa and establishing a live breathlessness pathway for patients.

This will be used to complement findings from the ongoing pilots in Amersham CDC and BOB ICS, and follows the success of the ongoing pilot at Queen Victoria Hospital/Sussex Integrated Care System for the breathlessness pathway.

“We are gaining momentum in the CDC space following the funding support released by NHSE. Each additional site builds the evidence base for wider rollout and helps convince the wider NHS of the unquestionable benefits of the symptom-based, straight-to-diagnostic pathway approach.

“A national conversation is growing around how CDCs can be used to drive down waitlists and demonstrates how the NHS can achieve a return on their capital investments to date in building CDCs. This is about leveraging the diagnostic outputs of the CDC to drive down waitlists by integrating them into patient pathways.

“We are focused on further demonstrating the impact of a pathway approach on CDC utilisation and wider patient wait times – by providing multiple service lines and mutual aid delivery models for sharing workforce capacity at a regional basis through the Bleepa platform. We continue to have a number of discussions at the local, regional and national levels with NHS bodies and anticipate further updates in the coming months.

“Furthermore, we are encouraged by the increased NHS spending announced in the Spring Budget, highlighting the importance of investing in digital capabilities for the UK healthcare system. It is essential that the UK has a modern system that is able to provide timely care for patients – and we believe that Bleepa could have an integral role to play.”

Dr Tom Oakley, CEO