Everyone is looking for someone

An imaging manager is 11 weeks into covering a single sonographer vacancy. She has a list of agencies. She does not know which of them has ever placed a sonographer in a department like hers, or which is quoting a rate three other trusts have already turned down.

A radiotherapy service is short two therapeutic radiographers and is quietly extending treatment waits while it looks. A clinical oncologist is covering the gap by working through what used to be her research time.

A reporting radiologist with nine years of cross-sectional experience is sending the same CV to a sixth agency, because that is the only way she knows to be seen. She has no idea whether anyone will read it.

A supplier with real specialist reach is bidding for a service he has never visited, for a department whose actual problem he can only guess at.

All of them are working on the same problem from different sides. None of them can see the others.

Healthcare is not short of capability

This is what makes the shortage so frustrating. The sonographer exists. The therapeutic radiographer exists. The supplier who could mobilise a mobile unit inside three weeks exists. The outsourced reporting capacity exists somewhere in the system.

What is missing is a way of finding it, assessing whether it is any good, and reaching the right person before the problem becomes a waiting list.

Imaging and oncology show this more sharply than most specialties, because a capacity problem here is rarely just a staffing problem. It might need additional radiographers. It might need outsourced reporting, a mobile unit, a managed service, additional linac capacity, or a combination that nobody has yet put together because no single person could see all the pieces.

The technology has advanced enormously. The commercial and professional infrastructure around it has not. Departments still find suppliers through word of mouth. Clinicians still find work through whoever happens to call them. Suppliers still discover requirements after the decision has effectively been made.

What we have built, and what we deliberately have not

Qura Healthcare goes live today [September 22, 2026]. It brings clinicians, healthcare providers, workforce suppliers and medical suppliers into one place, with the market intelligence that tells each of them where the others are.

It launches with a register of 3,836 named healthcare decision makers across 1,306 organisations, and a live feed of public procurement notices refreshed every day from Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, TED and SAM.gov. None of it is scraped from a mailing list. All of it can be checked.

Two things about how it works matter more than any feature list.

Verification is done by a person. When a clinician joins Qura, one of us opens the official register, whether that is the GMC, the HCPC or another regulator, and finds them before any organisation can see their profile. A human check, on a public register, every time. It is slower, and it is the reason a hospital can trust what it is looking at.

AI does the repetitive work, and nothing else. Qura uses AI to analyse markets, surface relevant opportunities and draft the first version of documents. It does not decide who gets shortlisted, who gets a contract, or who is suitable for a role. Those decisions belong to the organisation making them, and we have built the platform so that it cannot quietly take them.

A platform that tells a clinician they have been shortlisted when no employer has said so has broken the only thing it was selling.

What this means, whichever side you are on

If you are a radiographer, sonographer, radiologist, therapeutic radiographer or clinical oncologist, you build a verified profile once. Organisations looking for exactly your skills can then find you, including ones you would never have thought to apply to, and including work outside the UK if that interests you. It is free, and it always will be.

If you run an imaging or oncology service, you can see which suppliers hold positions on NHS Workforce Alliance or HealthTrust Europe and which lots they cover. You can also see whether a colleague in another department has already spoken to them, which happens more often than most organisations realise. If you sell equipment, consumables or services into imaging and oncology, you can see live demand as it emerges rather than when the tender lands, and see who inside the organisation is behind it.

Between us we have spent more than 30 years in healthcare workforce, delivery and market development. Most of that time we have watched capable people fail to find each other, and watched patients wait while they did. Qura is our attempt to close that gap.

Today

Qura is live at qurahealth.org, and the Qura Health app is on Google Play. If you are a clinician in imaging or oncology, create a verified profile. It takes about two minutes, it is free, and from that point organisations can find you rather than the other way round.

Whether this works is not something we get to decide. It depends on whether the people reading this find it genuinely useful, and tell us when it is not.

Healthcare does not always need another solution. Sometimes it needs a better way of finding the ones that already exist.

The content on this page is provided by the individuals concerned and does not represent the views or opinions of RAD Magazine.