NHS Corridor Care

Monica Harding Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Alison Bennett]

I agree with my hon. Friend. What we see time and again is that one problem becomes another until eventually the patient pays the price. My constituent, Catherine Jeater, has seen corridor care as a patient and as a relative of a patient. She watched her father being treated for appendicitis in an emergency department that was so overcrowded that patients were double-parked on trolleys, changing into hospital gowns in full view of strangers. Months later, while undergoing chemotherapy herself, she attended the Princess Royal hospital with a chest infection. Because she was immunocompromised, she should have been isolated. Instead, she received intravenous antibiotics sitting on a chair in a corridor, because no cubicles were available. She told me the staff were amazing, but she also made it clear that amazing staff should never have to work in those conditions

Perhaps the most difficult responses I have received were from the healthcare professionals themselves. One doctor told me that they regularly examine patients in corridors. Another said that corridor care is not just an A&E problem, and that it is now normal for people to be on trolleys in non-clinical areas throughout the hospital. That means there are no curtains to provide privacy, no piped oxygen and no name above the bed, and patient safety is inevitably compromised. A senior nurse described to me the moral injury that they and their colleagues face every day, having to try to deliver the best care possible in terrible conditions, all the while apologising for something that is beyond their power to fix. They have to do that every single day. I am not personally enjoying this third heat wave, but imagine A&E departments without air conditioning: they become furnaces. Imagine trying to treat incredibly frail patients when the temperature in a corridor is 40°C. Another clinician wrote something that stopped me in my tracks. They said that corridor care had become so common that they were teaching medical students and junior doctors how to provide it—and that is not just during winter pressures, but all year round.

This should trouble every single one of us. We are training the next generation of clinicians to adapt to something that should never have become normal in the first place. The real danger is not simply that corridor care exists, and not that we begin to accept it, but that we shrug our shoulders and tell ourselves that this is just how the NHS works now. The solutions are not easy—hospitals cannot fix this on their own—but we do need to get it right. We need to invest in capacity, in workforce, in social care, and in reducing waiting lists so that treatable conditions do not turn into emergencies.

[Monica Harding (Esher and Walton) (LD)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Alison Bennett]

I am sorry, but I will not, in the interests of time.

This is happening not because our NHS staff are failing, but because they are being asked to deliver excellent care in circumstances that make excellence almost impossible. My constituents have not shared these stories because they have lost faith in the NHS; they have shared them because they believe that the NHS can and should be better than this. Let me therefore end with a plea that we never describe corridor care as the “new normal”, because there is nothing normal about receiving intravenous antibiotics during chemo in a corridor. There is nothing normal about waiting 19 hours on a trolley. There is nothing normal about losing your privacy, your dignity, and sometimes even your safety, simply because there is nowhere else to go. The NHS was founded on the belief that every person matters. We need to make that happen once again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Naushabah Khan]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that very important issue.

Yet while corridor care was rising in our hospitals, the previous Government did not count the numbers. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), who as Health Secretary chose to publish the official data, because how can we fix what we cannot measure? I also welcome the steps taken by the Government to turn the tide on the mess we inherited, such as the millions of extra appointments delivered, bringing waiting lists down from record highs, and the commitment to end corridor care by 2029.

However, corridor care does not begin in the corridor itself, as many Members have noted. It begins with the hospital bed that cannot be freed, as well as the lack of investment in the wider landscape and the lack of support in our communities. This January, the data suggested that one in 10 NHS beds were occupied by people who were medically fit to leave but had no safe place to go—a failure that costs the state £2.7 billion a year, and that costs some of our constituents their lives.

[Monica Harding]

My mother, who is 94 and fit and healthy, fell and fractured her collarbone. She went in and was medically discharged on the same day, but because there was no care support for her, she was then in hospital for a week, bed blocking. Because of the quality of care she received, when she came out she ended up with a very severe urinary tract infection and sepsis, and then had to stay in hospital for six weeks. Obviously that cost my mother a lot, but it also cost the NHS a huge amount of money. Does the hon. Lady agree that one of the problems is adult social care and that we need to fix it?

[Naushabah Khan]

The hon. Member makes a very powerful point. I will come to adult social care in a moment.

We simply cannot end corridor care at the front door of the hospital when the back door remains jammed shut. I welcome the steps taken to reform adult social care—a £3.7 billion funding boost for local authorities—but it is clear that we must go further. I eagerly await Baroness Casey’s independent commission on adult social care. However, I am concerned that the review’s terms of reference call for recommendations to be implemented in a phased way over a decade. That is simply not fast enough. Social care reform must work in lockstep with NHS reform. A commission reporting in 2026 and 2028, with implementation stretched over a decade and beyond, will not be able to enact the scale of change needed to meet our targets. I urge the Government to move at pace.