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‘Corridor care’ should be an oxymoron, but is instead such a feature of the NHS now that nearly 3,000 people a day found themselves being treated in corridors, cupboards or even car parks last month. New figures show that 2,241 patients a day on average who had corridor care while in A&E, with a further 669 being cared for in cupboards, toilets and car parks. These are the latest official figures which show how the NHS isn’t working – but earlier in the week the Royal College of Emergency Medicine came up with its own estimate of how many people were dying unnecessarily as a result of long A&E waits: 1,300 a month.
A&E has been broken for at least a decade now
Both figures provoked interest but not outrage for the simple reason that they’re not surprising or particularly new: A&E has been broken for at least a decade now. The RCEM’s analysis suggests that in that time, the excess deaths have risen tenfold, from 1,657 in 2015 to 15,860 in 2025. It used a study of more than five million patients to develop this estimate.
Whether or not politicians agree with the figures – and they often quibble with these kinds of estimates from the RCEM – there is a bigger problem here, one identified by RCEM President Ian Higginson. He said:
