Corridor care will continue for another three years – that’s not good enough
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4 min read
It’s 3am in an A&E corridor. A patient lies on a trolley under harsh-strip lighting, their drip stand wedged beside a fire door.
They desperately need the toilet but are too embarrassed to ask. Not with strangers listening, not with people staring, not without even the privacy of a curtain.
A few feet away, someone is vomiting into a bowl held by a relative. Someone else is confused and crying out. A paramedic crew waits with their patient because there are no spare beds to hand them over to the hospital team. Staff are doing their best, working hard to deliver emergency care in corridors that were never designed for patients. This is corridor care. And it has become normal.
It’s what happens when the NHS has run out of room. It means intimate conversations about cancer, stroke, or dementia in earshot of strangers. It means delays to assessment and treatment, including pain relief, become more likely – dignity stripped away through lack of capacity.
One of my constituents was recently left for 22 hours in A&E while seriously ill before finally being admitted to a ward. Twenty-two hours, while unwell and surrounded by other desperately sick people, increases risk of deterioration, missed diagnoses, falls and infections spreading in overcrowded spaces.
Last year, more than half a million people were left on trolleys in corridors for over 12 hours. It is no surprise that one in three people say they have avoided A&E because of waiting times.
You cannot deliver safe care at speed when patients are packed into spaces never designed for treatment
The Health Secretary has pledged to end corridor care – by 2029. But infection will not wait until 2029. Neither will antimicrobial resistance. When hospitals are overcrowded, basic infection control becomes harder to maintain. You cannot isolate infectious patients properly. You cannot separate the vulnerable from the contagious. You cannot deliver safe care at speed when patients are packed into spaces never designed for treatment. The result is more transmission, more antibiotic use and more opportunities for resistant bacteria to spread.
That is what antimicrobial resistance means in practice. The antibiotics we rely on become less effective. Routine infections become harder to treat. Everyday medical care, from operations to chemotherapy, becomes riskier because the safety net of effective antibiotics is weakened.
So, why are we here? Corridor care is often described as a complex systems issue. It is. It reflects rising demand, workforce shortages and lack of capacity. But one driver is impossible to ignore: the social care crisis.
When patients are medically fit for discharge but have nowhere safe to go, because care packages are not available, community support has been hollowed out, or families are left carrying impossible burdens, beds stay blocked. That slows the flow of the entire hospital. The pressure builds, and it bursts in the place that cannot close its doors: A&E.
People who should be treated in the community, near loved ones and away from clinical settings, are left with no option but to remain in hospital. The social care crisis condemns thousands to lengthy stays, not because they need acute care, but because there is nowhere else.
To be serious about ending corridor care is to be serious about fixing social care. Sorting it by 2029 is too little, too late. Corridor care is not an unfortunate by-product of a busy NHS. It is a national safety issue and should be treated like one.
We need action now: urgent measures to improve patient flow, invest in community and social care capacity, and support the workforce that is holding the system together. Because a health service that treats people in corridors is not just under strain – it is signalling loudly that it is being asked to do the impossible, and patients are paying the price.
Danny Chambers is the Liberal Democrat MP for Winchester
