Temporary scanners in Minehead

In August 2025, we temporarily located a mobile CT and a mobile MRI scanner in Minehead. This was a temporary measure while the Bridgwater Diagnostic Centre was being built, and we removed them on 27 March 2026.

Since September 2021, when the first community diagnostic centre opened in Somerset, we have significantly expanded CT and MRI capacity in the county. The Taunton Diagnostic Centre opened in September 2021, the Yeovil Diagnostic Centre opened in January 2026, and the Bridgwater Diagnostic Centre is scheduled to open this summer.

In August 2025, we located the mobile scanners at Minehead Community Hospital and communicated that the service was temporary. We estimated that they would enable us to provide approximately 4,000 scans to people from Minehead and the surrounding areas and said at the time that the scanners would be open five days a week. Unfortunately take up was not as high as we expected and the scanners were utilised just two days a week.

The trust’s radiology booking team books all scanning appointments in Somerset. The team tried to increase the utilisation of the Minehead scanners by offering scans in Minehead to people living further afield. Even though the waiting times for scans in Minehead were shorter, people from other parts of Somerset were not willing to travel to Minehead for their scans and utilisation of the scanners remained very low.

The radiology booking team uses a clinically-led process to book scans to ensure that patients have their scans on equipment appropriate for their needs. Not all scanning equipment has the same diagnostic capability, and this means that some people from Minehead and the surrounding areas could not be offered scans in Minehead because they required their scans on more specialist equipment.

Waits for routine MRI and CT scans in West Somerset are much shorter than the national picture. At the end of February 2026, waits for people in West Somerset were up to one week for a routine scan while the wait for people in the rest of Somerset was between 4 – 6 weeks. Nationally, 18.7% were waiting over six weeks for an MRI scan, 9.6% for a CT scan. We will continue to monitor the time that people in West Somerset wait for a routine scan.

We want to provide services as close to local communities as possible and we will continue to look at what services we can provide in West Somerset. However, we must strike a balance between the needs of communities, local people’s access to services and economies of scale that influence what services can be provided in local communities.