UCL Study Finds NHS Chest-AI Rollout Lagging at One-Third of Trusts

Overview

• Contracting ran 4–10 months over plan, leaving 23 of 66 participating hospital trusts without clinical use of the tools by June 2025.
• The 2023 NHS England programme spans 66 trusts in 12 imaging diagnostic networks and was reported as £21 million, with tools prioritising urgent cases and flagging scan abnormalities.
• Barriers included overworked clinicians, complex governance, skepticism about AI, and integration with ageing and varied local IT systems.
• Adoption was helped by national programme leadership, resource sharing within imaging networks, committed local teams and the use of dedicated project managers.
• The NIHR-funded UCL, Nuffield Trust and Cambridge team recommends early and ongoing staff training and central procurement support, and it is now studying embedded use and patient and carer perspectives.