Alliance Medical opens purpose-built PET-CT centre at Southend Hospital

A purpose-built PET-CT centre owned and run by Alliance Medical is now fully operational at Southend Hospital in Essex, Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust said on 14 October 2026. The single-storey unit scanned its first patients in late September and replaces a temporary mobile scanning unit that previously housed the hospital’s PET-CT scanner and reception, according to the trust’s announcement.

The trust described the centre as a major investment in diagnostic services at Southend Hospital but gave no cost, and did not name the scanner’s manufacturer or model. Dr Jonathan Mo, Consultant Radiologist, said the equipment provides faster scans and is expected to allow around five extra patients to be scanned each day, which he put at an increase in capacity of more than 20 per cent.

What the new unit includes

The centre sits next to the Outpatients Department. It has six dedicated rooms where patients wait after receiving a tracer injection and before their scan, larger waiting areas, a laboratory, a booking office and improved support facilities for patients and staff. The trust said the facility followed several years of planning by clinical, operational and estates teams, and that the extra capacity will help meet growing demand for cancer and other specialist diagnostic imaging.

This new facility is a significant enhancement to our existing PET-CT service, helping us deliver the high standard of care our patients deserve.

Dr Shaifali Jain, Consultant Radiologist for Cancer Services, Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust

Other diagnostics changes at the trust

The trust has also moved its pathology to an outside operator. On 1 October 2026 SYNLAB UK and Ireland launched SYNLAB Essex, bringing together pathology for the trust’s Basildon, Broomfield and Southend hospitals, services that also support GP practices, for a population of about 1.2 million under a 15-year contract, Pathology in Practice reported. SYNLAB uses a hub-and-spoke model, with routine and specialist testing in high-capacity hub laboratories and modernised laboratories on each hospital site for emergency and inpatient work, and plans a Cellular Pathology Hub in Basildon in late 2027, according to the same report.

Separately, the trust held a formal opening on 16 October for Braintree Community Diagnostic Centre, which opened to patients the previous month and is expected to provide about 75,000 additional diagnostic appointments a year. It is the third of four community diagnostic centres planned in mid and south Essex, with a larger centre in Pitsea due in summer 2027, the trust said.

Our reading

The points below are analysis by The Healthcare Daily.

• The Healthcare Daily’s reading: Alliance Medical, not the trust, owns and runs the Southend unit, which suggests the capital cost of replacing the mobile scanner sits with the supplier, although the trust did not say how the centre was funded. That kind of structure can let a trust add imaging capacity without a capital bid, with the price carried in the service contract, whose term and per-scan pricing were not disclosed.
• On the trust’s own numbers, five extra patients a day being more than a 20 per cent increase implies the previous unit was scanning fewer than 25 patients a day. That is our arithmetic from the stated figures, not a throughput figure the trust has published.
• Taken together with the SYNLAB contract, the trust now relies on outside operators for PET-CT at Southend and for pathology across its three hospitals. Suppliers bidding for NHS diagnostics work should note that Alliance Medical owns the Southend facility as well as running it.