Peter Prinsley

“It is true: I am another doctor. I qualified in 1982, probably long before my distinguished colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan), was even born. I thank her very much for securing this important debate. For context, when I was a registrar in 1988, the NHS had 300,000 beds, but by the time I was a senior consultant in 2020, we had 140,000 beds—less than half the beds we had when I was a registrar. I recall how the Northern general hospital in Sheffield had rows of Nightingale wards with crisp, white linen stretching as far as the eye could see down to the end of the ward. There were always beds. There was no such thing as corridor care. To echo what the distinguished GP, my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Opher) said, if an elderly woman goes off her legs at five o’clock on a Friday evening in February, the family will call the GP. The answerphone will say “Dial 111”, the call handler will triage her and advise ringing 999, and that woman will arrive at A&E at 9 o’clock in the evening, be seen at 1 in the morning and be admitted, because that is what happens if someone is seen at 1 in the morning. If we had a functioning community health service, with more neighbourhood health services, the patient would probably have been visited by a GP, perhaps until 10 o’clock at night. The diagnosis of a urinary tract infection would have been made, the patient would have been given an antibiotic and somebody would have come to see them in the morning, and they would have been a lot better by then and would never have been admitted. We can definitely reduce admissions if we think more carefully about how we treat patients in the community. “Corridor care” is an oxymoron. There should be no corridor care. As we have heard, it happens when patients arriving in A&E overwhelm the available cubicles and rooms and the wards have no beds, and we know that patients are sent to A&E because the GP system simply cannot cope. I understand that the APPG on emergency care found that 20% of major emergency departments had patients being cared for on trolleys or in chairs in corridors. Almost 80% of clinical leads also said that patients were being harmed by corridor care. My son is an A&E doctor, who is presently in London. He texted me shortly after I was elected: “Dad, bring the Health Secretary here right now so that he can see what is going on.” There were queues of trollies and patients waiting in ambulances, and trollies in the car park. We know that many patients come to serious harm while waiting. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud said, A&E means accident and emergency; that is what it is for. At West Suffolk hospital in my constituency, Dr Cameron, the chief executive, said that corridor care had been “sorted out” through a whole-hospital approach, with everyone thinking about patient flow, planning discharge early and involving social services, allied health professionals and pharmacy. West Suffolk hospital simply refused to accept that corridor care was inevitable. I believe that we should take the best of those ideas to the rest of the NHS.”