Hospitals left a record 518,000 patients on trolleys in emergency departments for 12 hours or more last year, damning figures show.
The figure is 400 times higher than the 1,306 reported a decade ago and comes due to a major shortage of beds, preventing staff from moving new arrivals into wards.
It shows emergency departments were already dangerously overwhelmed before this winter’s flu outbreak, forcing around 20 trusts to report ‘critical incidents’.
NHS England said an average of 5,408 patients a day were in hospital with flu last week, including 256 in intensive care.
She believes these numbers will rise as children return to school, where they risk contracting the virus and bringing it home to families and vulnerable relatives.
Carrie Johnson, wife of former Prime Minister Boris, revealed this weekend that she spent the first week of 2025 in an NHS hospital with flu and pneumonia.
She said she struggled to breathe properly during a “nasty” infection that lasted almost 18 days, and urged the public to get a flu shot.
Figures published this Thursday say the NHS is expected to suffer its worst flu season in a decade.
The figure is 400 times higher than the 1,306 reported a decade ago and comes amid a major shortage of beds, preventing staff from moving new arrivals into wards (stock image)
Joanna Ormesher yesterday tweeted this photo of the main corridor of the Royal Blackburn Hospital in Lancashire, saying: ‘Patients are locked out of cold corridors to be gawked at like exhibits in a zoo. No patient dignity and poor patient care. Embarrassing at best’
Emergency and ambulance services had their busiest year ever in 2024, with crews dealing with more incidents in December than in any other month
It comes as Labor was last night accused of being ‘asleep at the wheel’ during the crisis, which is expected to worsen this week.
Professor Phil Banfield, chairman of the British Medical Association, described hospital care as ‘undignified’ and ‘unsafe’; warning scenes in NHS hospitals are now ‘similar to those in developing countries’.
He said hundreds of patients suffer preventable harm and deaths every week, with some dying before they are even seen by doctors.
Some ERs are operating at more than 200 percent capacity, with wait times of up to 50 hours for a bed and ambulances waiting in 18-row lines outside to transfer new arrivals.
Last week, Whittington Hospital in north London published several adverts for nurses to work overtime and provide ‘corridor care’ to patients on trolleys.
And NHS trusts across the country are now installing sockets and oxygen pipes in corridors as they prepare to treat more patients in trolleys lining their walls.
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) said corridors are ‘open, noisy, brightly lit and often cold’, making it ‘difficult, if not impossible’ for patients to rest.
It stressed that it is ‘not possible’ to control the spread of infections, that it is ‘challenging’ for staff to monitor patients, and that privacy, dignity and confidentiality are ‘not maintained’.
The RCEM warns that long wait times in A&E are extremely dangerous and are estimated to have contributed to 14,000 deaths by 2023. Meanwhile, A&E and ambulance services had their busiest year on record in 2024, with crews dealing with more incidents in December than any month whatsoever.
There were a record 518,213 waits of 12 hours or more in A&E last year – timed from the moment doctors decided to admit the patient – according to analysis of NHS England data by the Liberal Democrats.
NHS trusts across the country are now installing power sockets and oxygen pipes in corridors as they prepare to treat more patients in trolleys lining their walls (stock image)
There were a record 518,213 emergency room waits of 12 hours or more last year – from the moment doctors decided to admit the patient
A row of ambulances parked outside the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham earlier this week
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This is more than 100,000 – or 25 percent – more than last year, when there were 415,136.
In stark contrast, there were only 1,306 such waits in all of 2015 – fewer than in one day now.
Helen Morgan, the Lib Dems health and social care spokesperson, urged Health Secretary Wes Streeting to come up with a contingency plan to tackle “shocking and dangerous” emergency department waiting times. She said the government “seems to be asleep at the wheel.”
She said an immediate increase in the number of hospital beds is needed to bring occupancy rates to safe levels, which are typically estimated at 85 percent.
The RCEM said this currently stands at 93 per cent, meaning the NHS needs a further 9,471.
Last week, an average of 12,591 hospital beds a day in England were filled with patients who were deemed medically fit for discharge but were unable to leave. Many will have been waiting for a place in a care home or to arrange care in their own home.
Dr. Tim Cooksley, former president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said older patients left on the corridors are increasingly suffering damage, including “delirium, pressure ulcers and psychological problems”.
He added: ‘Patients’ confidence in the NHS is rapidly deteriorating and this is well-founded.
“The worsening of the current winter crisis over the past week was predictable and inevitable.”
Professor Banfield described the crisis as a ‘national emergency’, adding: ‘There are people, some elderly and vulnerable, who are waiting in emergency departments for far longer than we could ever have imagined just a few years ago and this leads directly to avoidable harm and avoidable harm. deaths.
‘If this were still the pandemic, Cobra (convened to deal with matters of national emergency) would be mobilized – why does losing the equivalent of a planeload of patients every month not generate the same sense of urgency?’
Dr. Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, described the figures as ‘staggering’ and the emergency room situation as ‘grim’.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said: ‘We have inherited a broken NHS, and in our first six months we have taken action to protect emergency departments this winter, by introducing the new RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) vaccine ), which provides more flu vaccines than last year, and ending strikes so that staff are on the front line and not on the picket line for the first winter in three years.
‘It will take time, but we are working to break this cycle of annual winter crises and will soon publish an urgent healthcare recovery plan.’