Healthcare
NHS Corridor Care
“I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan) on securing this debate and on her tremendous work in this area, both in this House and as an emergency doctor in the NHS. I want to begin not with statistics, but with something that happened to me. Last year, at about 9 o’clock one evening, I stood up to go to watch a film with my family, but I suddenly felt faint and nauseous. A home blood pressure machine showed that my reading was over 200. I went to A&E and was seen, and a CT scan was arranged. I then had to sit on a chair in what was essentially a public waiting room, where I stayed for the entire day. I had my scans and blood tests there—everything was based in that room. It was only the next evening that I managed to get a bed on an acute unit, so I spent 24 hours in effectively what we would call a corridor. The next day I had an MRI scan and then went to see a neurologist and a stroke team. Let me be absolutely clear: I do not blame the hospital or the staff. They were professional and compassionate throughout. But they are working under chronic pressure in a system that simply does not have the space or the beds to care for patients as they would wish. The first official NHS England data on corridor care published last month showed that in the Royal Bolton hospital, an average of 13 patients a day were treated in corridor spaces in May. I welcome the honesty of the trust’s chief nursing officer, who said that even one patient cared for in this way is far too many, and I commend the trust’s commitment to eliminate the practice ahead of the national timescale. Bolton is not an outlier; it reflects a national emergency across the United Kingdom. About 2,200 patients experienced corridor care on any day in the month of May, while many hundreds were treated in unsuitable spaces. Nearly 148,000 patients waited 12 hours or more in A&E in that month—the worst record in May. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine warns that the official figure may still understate the true scale. This is not just undignified; it is deadly. The Royal College estimates that in 2025 alone, over 15,800 excess deaths were associated with long waits in emergency departments. The Uncorked—Understanding escalation area and corridor care in UK emergency departments—study found that corridor care leads to longer hospital stays and a greater risk of death. There are many reasons for the delay, and many of them have been mentioned. Bed occupancy is running at 93%, far above the safe level of 85%, while some 13,000 beds are occupied by patients who are medically fit to leave but cannot be discharged for want of social and community care. I know that the Government have spent a lot of money on the NHS, such as ending the doctors’ dispute, but will they make a full commitment to ensure that corridor care does not occur in our country and that no patient in Bolton and Walkden, or anywhere else in the United Kingdom, spends a day of acute illness on a chair in a waiting room? The staff of our NHS deserve better, as do our constituents.”
