More than 500,000 patients in the UK faced trolley waits of at least 12 hours in accident and emergency (A&E) services last year, a new study revealed on Monday.
Corridor care in hospitals is being ‘normalised’, warns the study by the Liberal Democrat Party, as it found that a record 518,000 ‘trolley waits’ of 12 hours or more were recorded in 2024.
The party’s health spokeswoman Helen Morgan said the scale of the problem was a “scandal” and that the Government was “asleep at the wheel.”
She called on Health Minister Wes Streeting to announce an urgent plan to increase the number of hospital beds and end corridor care. She also added:
“It is a scandal that corridor care is becoming normalized with thousands of patients left on trolleys for hours or even days on end.”
The analysis showed that in 2024 a record number of patients waited 12 hours or more to get to hospital from A&E, a 25 per cent increase on the previous year.
“Shockingly, the number of patients waiting 12 hours or more to be admitted to hospital from A&E last year was up 23-fold from 8,272 in 2019,” according to the research.
Citing data from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, the study authors said that in 2023, an estimated 14,000 deaths will be attributed to long emergency department waits.
“It must include an urgent expansion of the number of hospital beds to get back to safe levels and a pandemic-style emergency recruitment campaign to bring staff out of retirement and back into the workforce,” Morgan said.
The UK’s National Health Service in a statement last week, said hospitals in England experienced “the busiest year in history” for A&E and ambulance services last year, as flu will continue to put pressure on hospitals until 2025.
