NHS Corridor Care

James Naish Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Dr Simon Opher (Stroud) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan) for securing this debate and for her years of work in the A&E at St George’s. Emergency care is in crisis in the NHS, and corridor care is just an overspill because we cannot cope. That is because we are doing a few things wrong that we could remedy.

I work as a GP. I did a surgery last Friday and actually tried to admit someone. I rang up A&E and they said, “Well, I wouldn’t send them up at the moment, as we’ve got a six-hour wait.” I realised that, quite often, we do not have an operable emergency care service, and this is something we need to work on.

I will briefly go through a few causes and then a few remedies, and the remedies could be clinical as well as organisational. First, we have an ageing population. Frailty is increasing. In Stroud alone, in four years, the number of over 90-year-olds went up 29% in just that short period of time. We have an enormous cohort of very elderly and frail people. Secondly, as we have heard, we have a lack of beds due to delayed discharge—I will not say any more on that. Thirdly, we have a lack of care beds in the community to enable discharge. There is also a lack of capacity in GP surgeries for on-the-day appointments. In my surgery, 45% of our appointments are on the day, but we obviously need to increase that so we can absorb the demand in primary care.

[James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)]

I have sat through the debate, and I do not believe that community pharmacy or independent prescribing have been mentioned. Does my hon. Friend, with his experience as a GP, endorse the changes that the Government are making to maximise the use of pharmacists to deal with some of the pressures that he mentioned GPs face?

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[James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker—I appreciate being called. Before I begin my speech, I note that my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Dr Cooper) mentioned coastal communities. She was absolutely right to do so, and I will refer to rural communities, because there are equal challenges with delivering healthcare to that particular demographic.

I will start with some good news for my constituents. Last year, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS trust was named among the 10 most improved trusts in England for four-hour A&E performance, and sixth nationally for 12-hour waits. That is not a small thing; it reflects genuine hard graft by staff at Queen’s Medical Centre and Nottingham City hospital, and it earns the trust a share of a £3 million reinvestment fund from NHS England. That sounds good, but I would be doing my constituents a disservice if I stood in this place and pretended that the job was done, because just over a week ago, on 29 June, NUH declared a critical incident after the recent extreme heat drove demand across the trust far beyond what its emergency department could safely absorb. What is more, it was the fourth critical incident over the past year. At its worst, during the latest incident, there were 188 patients in the emergency department and 20 ambulances queuing outside. Patients were experiencing lengthy waits on corridors, and more people than expected were medically fit but unable to be discharged.

I recently asked the Government about this issue, and the Minister’s response was clear: corridor care was “unacceptable”, and should never become normal practice. That should not even need saying, and it is only after 14 years of drift that it did. What matters now is action, and the Government have published a national definition of corridor care for the first time and started daily reporting, so that neither trusts nor we in this place can hide the problem. Thankfully, that transparency is being backed by some new money: over £450 million is going into urgent and emergency care capacity this year alone, and £215 million of capital funding is delivering 40 new and expanded urgent care sites across England. For my constituents, this means two things locally that I genuinely welcome: confirmed funding for an expanded urgent treatment centre at QMC, and a trust-funded reconfiguration of the emergency department, because our chief executive has found the money internally to get on with that work now, rather than wait.

I was particularly pleased to be able to tell this to one of my constituents, Renee, after she contacted me to tell me about her experience in A&E. As a lady in her 70s with a long-established heart condition for which she has ongoing consultant care, after a heart attack, she found herself spending nine hours waiting for care in A&E for a condition that should have been treated immediately. Nationally, A&E waiting times are at their best level in five years, and elective waiting lists are at their lowest in three and a half years. That is progress, but it will ultimately count for nothing in Rushcliffe if a bad winter, a system failure or a staffing gap can still tip a good department into crisis extremely quickly. As such, my ask of the Minister is simple: keep funding urgent and emergency care, keep the pressure on trusts that are lagging behind, and keep listening to Back Benchers, who regularly hear about this issue from doctors and constituents at our surgeries.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.