The Health Secretary has said he can’t “promise that there won’t be patients treated in corridors next year”. Wes Streeting said the Government would “never accept or tolerate” people being treated in “unsafe, undignified” conditions but that it would “take time to undo the damage” done to the NHS.
Pressures during the most recent cold snap caused several NHS trusts to declare critical incidents because of sustained pressure in A&E departments. The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has said many of the 54,207 patients waiting longer than 12 hours following a decision to admit in December – the third highest recorded number of patients with waits of this kind – will have received care in temporary environments, such as corridors or chairs.
In a statement to the Commons, Mr Streeting said “corridor care” had become “normalised in NHS hospitals under the previous government”. He told MPs: “I want to be clear, I will never accept or tolerate patients being treated in corridors. It is unsafe, undignified, a cruel consequence of 14 years of failure on the NHS and I am determined to consign it to the history books.
“I cannot and will not promise that there won’t be patients treated in corridors next year. It will take time to undo the damage that has been done to our NHS, but that is the ambition this Government has.”. Mr Streeting told the House that the experience of patients this winter has been “unacceptable” and the NHS is facing a “toxic cocktail of pressures”.
