UNWELCOME news and the severely-under-pressure NHS go hand in hand these days. There seems to be no end to it, though much of it needs no rehearsing here.

Concern has already been expressed over health boards failing to meet their waiting times for cancer patients and now the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR) has disclosed that such patients are experiencing delays of a month or longer because of a shortage of qualified radiologists.

The lack of specialists in interventional radiology means that only two of Scotland’s 12 health boards can offer full, 24-hour cover for emergency, minimally invasive pinhole procedures.

Many posts remain chronically unfilled. One-fifth of radiologists are due to retire within three years. The number of trainee radiologists, says the College, has been cut severely in the past and increased funding to recruit more trainee radiologists in hospitals is urgently needed. Paradoxically, given the shortage of radiologists, there are many more applicants than trainee posts available every year – a situation that other areas of the NHS, such as GP practices, can only dream of. This crisis should not exist at all.

Demand for radiologists’ services has rocketed by 55 per cent in the space of five years and will continue to increase exponentially. You do not need to be a health secretary – or, indeed, even a patient – to realise that all of this is going to lead to a problem that will not go away.

Royal Colleges generally speak in measured, non-alarmist tones, so when the RCR spokesman, Dr Grant Baxter, a doctor of 34 years’ standing, says that Scottish radiology is on the brink of collapse, he has to be listened to. Should it collapse, there would be no medical diagnoses or surgical operations whatsoever, as it is radiologists who carry out the essential interpretation of scans and X-rays.

Opposition political parties were, as ever, quick to attack the SNP Government on the back of the RCR statement and perhaps there is some justification in what they say. Health Secretary Shona Robison, however, staged a robust response, highlighting her government’s five-year, £100 million cancer strategy, which includes recruiting specialists with an interest in radiotherapy, and saying that the Scottish NHS now has 46 per cent more consultant clinical radiologists compared to September 2006. The aim is to increase the ranks of specialist radiotherapists.

But clearly, more needs to be done, and with some urgency. The RCR asserts that the Scottish Government should do more to increase trainee numbers: it is, after all, only in the last two years that these numbers have shown any sort of increase. More to the point, it should also support overseas recruitment for vacant consultant radiological posts, the college believes.

It has to be acknowledged, of course, that the collapse in Scottish radiology may not happen this week or this month, or even for a while yet. But the mere possibility is too catastrophic to contemplate. The solutions put forward by the Royal College of Radiologists may take a while to put into effect and even longer to bring about concrete change, but surely they are worth high-priority consideration.