NHS Corridor Care

Debate between Rosena Allin-Khan and Iqbal Mohamed

Wednesday 8th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Dr Allin-Khan]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I am so sorry to hear of the situation in her community in Scotland. It is regrettable, and patients and their families deserve better. Absolutely, if we cannot accurately assess the issue in full, it is impossible to deal with, and I hope the Minister will talk today about how she will commit to revising this definition to make it more robust.

[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

I thank the hon. Member for securing this debate and for allowing me to intervene. The Mid Yorkshire Teaching NHS trust published data about patients in corridors for the first time only in May, and in that month it recorded 121 patients per day being treated outside clinical rooms and areas. A constituent of mine, Catherine, wrote to me to describe seeing at first hand elderly people waiting in corridors for hours with no family members to support them. Does the hon. Member agree that corridor care has moved from being an exceptional problem to an everyday issue in many NHS trusts, and that the Government must act to address the root cause of this issue?

[Dr Allin-Khan]

The hon. Member is right, but I know that the Government care deeply about this. This is not something on which I am in tension with the Government in any way. I have spoken to the Ministers and the Secretary of State, and I know that they are committed to acting and ensuring that every single patient across our country gets the best possible care. Let us be really clear: the NHS should not be a political football. Safe and dignified healthcare should not be a political football. I hope that we are all in agreement on this issue today. I would have hoped to see more Members on the Opposition Benches today, and I hope that their absence is not a reflection of how much they care about the issue, because, quite frankly, we owe it to all our communities to get this right.

I know from my own experience, as will other hon. Friends in the Chamber, that when someone comes to A&E, it is often the worst day of their life. It could be the worst day of their life because of their experience as a patient, or it could be the worst day of their life because someone they love—their child, their partner, their mother or their father—is dying or has died. When we think about the dignity and care that we give, we have to look at it holistically—not simply as a set of symptoms that we are treating but as a family and the experience that they take away with them of what has happened on that day. People are in tears, people are in pain, and we owe it to them to get this right.