To ask the Minister of Health, in light of the March 2025 NI Audit Office report Health and Social Care Imaging Services, how he is going to ensure increased availability of CT scans, given that timely access to these is crucial for stroke treatments.

The recently published Elective Care Framework Implementation and Funding Plan sets out clear proposals for how we will systematically tackle the backlog of patients waiting longer than Ministerial standards and how we will transform services to allow us to meet the population’s demands in the future.

As part of the Implementation and Funding Plan, £12m has been secured to expand diagnostic imaging capacity across the region. This not only includes increasing capacity for CT but will include areas such as MRI and ultrasound. The initial focus will be ensuring that scanning sessions, not already commissioned, are recurrently funded Monday to Friday. Further work will then be undertaken to look at evening and weekend working.