NHS corridor care laid bare as gran, 81, left on plastic chairs in an A&E storeroom for 48 hours

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The NHS has issued a warning amid Labour’s crackdown on corridor care, after terminally ill 81-year-old Pam Smith's shocking experience at Royal Gwent Hospital in south Wales

A&Es are leaving sick patients "tucked away" in waiting rooms lying on plastic chairs so they don’t count towards their corridor care statistics, MPs have been told.

Emergency care leaders say under pressure medics are “gaming” the system since Labour launched a crackdown on corridor care this year. Corridor care became widespread in the NHS under the Tories after the Covid-19 pandemic and sees patients treated in non-clinical spaces such as corridors.

It comes as watchdog Healthwatch recorded more than 280,000 cases of corridor care over the summer, driven by record heatwaves and an average of 2,300 daily cases in July, but the new warning suggests the real picture could be even worse.

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There has been a string of shocking stories about their long A&E waits, including an 81-year-old woman with terminal cancer who was left lying on plastic chairs in an A&E storeroom for 48 hours.

Pam Smith, who has stage 4 cancer, went into Royal Gwent Hospital in south Wales suffering from a fever after undergoing chemotherapy but was told there were no beds available. There is no suggestion the Royal Gwent was gaming the statistics.

The Labour government has committed to phasing out corridor care and is the first to start counting it. NHS England introduced its first national definition of corridor care in March as a patient spending at least 45 minutes in a clinically inappropriate area of an emergency department.

Dr Ian Higginson, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, welcomed this but said the definition is “open to gaming”. He said: “It does not count patients who are in ambulances, or waiting to come into hospital, and those can be used by some organisations as pseudo cubicles.

“It does not count patients who are potentially in waiting rooms, waiting on our plastic chairs, or in what are called ‘off the clock’ units, waiting on hard plastic chairs for…

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