What is "corridor care"?

It is the term used when patients are treated in hospital corridors or other non-clinical spaces because no bed is available after the decision to admit them. It usually follows very long waits in A&E, and health leaders say it compromises dignity, privacy and safety.

What has Yvette Cooper asked NHS England to do?

She has asked the NHS England chief executive to draw up urgent new standards for how children are treated in A&E departments, and to produce an urgent plan to eliminate corridor care for children as a priority. The government also wants child-specific corridor-care figures collected for the first time.

How widespread is corridor care in England?

The government began collecting corridor-care figures this summer. In September, an average of 3,310 patients a day received corridor care — 2,549 in A&E departments and 761 elsewhere — up from 2,865 a day in August. In the same month, 50,582 patients waited more than 12 hours from a decision to admit.

Who was Finlay Roberts?

Finlay Roberts was a two-year-old boy who died in 2024 after spending the final hours of his life in a crowded A&E corridor. His parents, David and Liz Roberts, described the conditions as a "terrible mess" and said Liz was told to administer a suppository to Finlay in the corridor. The Health Secretary apologised to the family on behalf of the NHS.

What is the government doing about winter pressures?

Ministers have put £140 million into urgent care ahead of what is expected to be one of the toughest winters on record, following the busiest summer ever for England's emergency departments. The money funds 14 schemes including new urgent-care centres, additional ambulance fleets and emergency department upgrades. Flu and norovirus are expected to add further pressure.

Health Secretary: ending corridor care for children is an urgent priority

A pledge made on live television

The Health Secretary has made the treatment of children in hospital corridors a political priority, telling the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme that she has instructed NHS England to produce urgent new standards for paediatric care in emergency departments. Yvette Cooper said she had asked the NHS England chief executive to "have urgent new standards drawn up for how children should be treated in A&E, including an urgent plan to eliminate corridor care for children as a priority".

Speaking on Sunday (BBC report), Cooper insisted that the practice of caring for sick children in corridors must stop. "No child should be treated in a corridor," she said. "No patient should be treated in a corridor." She added: "I think we need urgent action to address corridor care and support for children."

The announcement matters because NHS England is the body that sets the operational standards hospitals in England must meet. Asking its chief executive for a dedicated children's plan — alongside newly collected child-specific corridor-care data — signals that the government believes young patients have been overlooked in how emergency care is measured and delivered.

The figures behind the pledge

The scale of the problem is becoming clearer only now, because ministers only began collecting dedicated corridor-care statistics this summer. The September numbers were stark: 50,582 patients in England waited more than 12 hours from the moment doctors decided to admit them — a figure that captures many of those treated in corridors — up from 44,951 in August.

The total number waiting at least four hours from a decision to admit reached 129,199 in September, up from 118,550 the month before. On an average day in September, 3,310 patients received what the figures classify as corridor care — 2,549 inside A&E departments and 761 in other parts of hospitals — up from an average of 2,865 a day in August.

Those numbers underline a system under strain even before winter begins. Emergency departments in England recorded around 7.3 million attendances between June and August, the highest summer total on record, after repeated heatwaves drove up demand. Health policy experts and the Department of Health and Social Care warn that the usual seasonal pressures from flu and norovirus will land on top of an already stretched service.

A family's story that forced the issue

The entrance to the Whittington Hospital in north London.

Geograph / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

The human cost was brought home on the programme itself. Cooper faced questions about Finlay Roberts, a two-year-old who died in 2024 after spending his final hours in a crowded A&E corridor. His father David Roberts told the BBC the situation had been a "terrible mess", describing how the family was briefly moved into a room with a bed before being returned to the corridor. "He just clung to me, as we now know, slowly dying," he said.

His mother Liz Roberts said corridor care "robs people of their dignity when they are at their most vulnerable", and recalled being told to administer a suppository to her dying toddler in the corridor because no other option was available.

After hearing their account, Cooper apologised to the Roberts family on behalf of the NHS. The Whittington Health NHS Trust, where Finlay was treated, extended its condolences to the family. The case has become a touchstone in the campaign — joined by more than a dozen health organisations calling for urgent action — to end corridor care for children first.

Children as a "sidecar" no longer

One of the most pointed parts of Cooper's interview was her admission that children's care has not been given the weight it deserves. "I'm clear that child health needs to be a much greater priority for the NHS," she said. "It's one of the things I've said since I started. Maternity and child care and child health, I think, has been treated as a bit of a sidecar for the National Health Service. I think it has to be a priority."

That language matters to paediatricians and children's charities, who have long argued that emergency departments are designed around adult patients and that children — who may deteriorate faster, struggle to describe symptoms, and need parents present — fare worse in chaotic corridor conditions. The promise of child-specific data collection is itself a policy shift: until now, corridor-care figures have not distinguished children from adults, which has made it harder to measure harm and target improvements.

Health policy experts note that similar promises have been made before and that standards alone do not create beds. The King's Fund and other think tanks have repeatedly warned that emergency departments reflect pressure across the whole hospital — discharge delays on wards, social care capacity, and GP access all push back into A&E. A plan focused on children will still depend on those wider constraints.

What the new standards could mean

While details are yet to be published, urgent standards for children in A&E would likely cover how quickly a child must be moved out of a corridor into an appropriate clinical area, how families are kept informed, and what staffing and safeguarding safeguards must be in place while a child waits. Separating the collection of children's data would let regulators and the public see whether hospitals are meeting those expectations.

The government has set a broader ambition to end corridor care entirely by the end of this parliament. Eliminating the practice for children first — where the safety and safeguarding arguments are strongest — is presented as the opening phase. Whether the timetable is realistic will depend on staffing, capital investment and winter demand, and the standards will need enforcement teeth to change behaviour in the most pressured departments.

There is precedent for targeted pressure working: dedicated paediatric emergency departments and children's observation units, where they exist, tend to record better experiences for families. The challenge is that many hospitals — especially smaller ones — handle children's emergencies within mixed adult departments, where corridors are more likely to be used as overflow.

Winter is coming, and it will test the promise

Before appearing on the programme, Cooper had warned that the NHS faces a more challenging winter than normal after multiple heatwaves produced the busiest summer on record. She announced £140 million of funding to boost urgent care capacity, describing the package as part of an effort to cope with the impact of seasonal illnesses, including flu and norovirus.

The money will go towards 14 schemes across England, including new urgent-care centres, additional ambulance fleets and upgrades to emergency departments. The aim is to create capacity before the worst of winter, when respiratory viruses traditionally fill beds and lengthen A&E waits.

Critics are not convinced the funding is enough. Shadow health secretary Damian Hinds said the government needed to act but asked ministers to explain where the money was coming from, while the Royal College of Nursing's England branch called the funding "just another sticking plaster". Mental health services, which also face rising demand among young people, compete for the same budgets.

What happens next

The immediate test is what NHS England produces and how fast. An urgent plan to eliminate corridor care for children would need to be visible to parents this winter — in how children are triaged, where they wait, and how hospitals report their performance. The collection of child-specific corridor-care figures will give campaigners and the media a monthly scoreboard against which to judge the pledge.

Longer term, the promise to end corridor care more broadly by the end of the parliament sets a measurable, if ambitious, target. Meeting it would require not just new A&E standards but sustained progress on discharges, social care, staffing and hospital capacity — the underlying drivers that push patients into corridors in the first place.

For families like the Robertses, the politics are secondary. What mattered on Sunday was a public acknowledgement, from the top of the health service, that treating a dying two-year-old in a corridor was a failure — and a promise, on live television, that it will not be repeated. The rest is delivery. And as the data makes clear, there is a great deal of it to do.