A hospital in Sydney’s inner west is paying private contractors almost $200,000 a month to keep up with demand for MRIs, X-rays and other scans as one-quarter of positions in its radiology department remain unfilled.

Sydney Local Health District spent more than $2.4 million last financial year on outsourcing radiology work at Concord Hospital, internal NSW Health data seen by the Herald reveals.

The bulk of the expenditure occurred from July to September last year, when the hospital was still grappling with a backlog of radiology scans that snowballed to more than 50,000 at its peak .

Despite the backlog falling to around 200 images older than a month by September, the data shows the hospital has continued to spend hundreds of thousands outsourcing the work of analysing and reportin

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