NHS Corridor Care

Jayne Kirkham Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan) for organising this debate. It is really important and very timely. Corridor care is a visible symptom of the pressure our NHS is under. According to Age UK, the number of people experiencing corridor care has grown 563-fold since 2015. In Cornwall, where I am from, it is no longer a seasonal response to winter or summer pressures but happens all year round. This is true of the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS trust in my constituency, which includes Treliske, Cornwall’s only major acute hospital. On any given day in May, 31 patients in RCHT were receiving corridor care in the emergency department and 16 on the wards. One ex-clinician said to me that corridor care

“distresses patients, costs lives and demoralises staff”.

Patients treated in temporary escalation spaces face a lack of privacy and dignity and limited access to necessities such as food, water and toileting. They experience worse outcomes as well. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has estimated that in 2024 there were 16,500-plus associated excess deaths related to stays of 12 hours or more before being admitted. We know that part of the root cause of the problem is a lack of bed space and staff in hospitals. While Treliske’s overall four-hour performance has averaged 45.8% so far this year, its performance for patients admitted to hospital averages 26.3%, so patients just are not moving through the system quickly enough.

Since this Government came to power, there have been some welcome improvements, particularly in ambulance handover times. Our local ambulance trust, the South Western Ambulance Service NHS foundation trust, has got much faster at moving patients from ambulances, so that the ambulances do not waste so much time sitting outside the emergency department, but of course, moving patients faster can increase the queue in ED and the need for corridor care there.

On any given day in May, 103 hospital beds were occupied by patients who were fit to leave, which represents over 15% of all general and acute beds within the trust. It is crucial that we address gaps in community and social care provision and strengthen the integration between hospitals and social care so that these patients can come out faster, reducing the pressure. The 10-year plan is committed to ending corridor care, and I welcome that emphasis. Part of that approach involves strengthening co-ordination between the NHS, social care and the voluntary sector. We have very good neighbourhood health teams in Cornwall. They are ahead of the game and their community health and wellbeing workers are proven to make a real impact on hospital admissions.

The NHS’s urgent and emergency care plan sets out a number of other important measures to reduce corridor care, including reducing internal discharge delays of more than 48 hours and investing £450 million in same-day emergency care. I welcome the expansion of same-day emergency care capacity at our community hospitals and the efforts that are being made by mobilising the third sector. However, that must be balanced with the fact that sending people home so early without proper rehab can increase the risk of them coming back and increase the demands on GP surgeries.

Kernow Health CIC runs out-of-hours GPs, a 111 advice service, and a line for clinicians to talk to paramedics. That has led to some people not having to go into hospital. We also have a specialist falls car that can help with nine callouts a day, and stop people going into hospital when they fall. So much more could be done and there have been many suggestions, but ultimately, corridor care needs to be treated as a system-wide problem. We must also look again at the way we treat people at weekends, because closure over a weekend can make such a difference.