Speaking in a Commons debate this week, I shared my own experience of spending a full day on a chair in an A&E waiting room while acutely unwell, and called on the Government to take urgent action to end the practice of corridor care.
Some months ago, I felt suddenly faint and nauseous one evening, with a blood pressure reading over 200. I went to A&E, was seen, and had a CT scan arranged. But I was then sent to sit in a public waiting room, where I stayed for the entire day, having scans and blood tests while based in that room. It was only the following evening that I finally got a bed on the acute unit.
I do not blame the hospital or its staff, who 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. If this can happen to a Member of this House, it is happening every single day to our constituents, many of them frail, elderly, and far more vulnerable than I was.
The figures bear this out. The first official NHS England data on corridor care, published last month, showed that at 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 one too many, and I commend the trust’s commitment to eliminate the practice ahead of the national timeframe.
But Bolton is not an outlier. It reflects a national emergency. Across England, more than 2,200 patients experienced corridor care in emergency departments on any given day in May, with hundreds more treated in unsuitable spaces on wards. Nearly 148,000 patients waited twelve hours or more in A&E that month, the worst May on record. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine warns that the official figures may still understate the true scale.
This is not just undignified. It is deadly. The Royal College estimates that in 2025 alone, there were over 15,800 excess deaths associated with long waits in emergency departments.
The causes are well understood. This is not simply about demand at the front door, it is about flow. Bed occupancy is running at 93 per cent, far above the safe level of 85 per cent, 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 asked the Minister whether the Government would match their commitment to ending corridor care by the end of this Parliament with real action, including a plan to bring bed occupancy down to safe levels, a national drive on delayed discharges, and proper investment in social care.
The staff of our NHS deserve better. Our constituents deserve better. It is time to end corridor care for good.