Wes Streeting said leaving sick people languishing on trolleys should not be normalised and signalled he’d go faster on his pledge to eradicate corridor care by the next election
Wes Streeting has said he is “ashamed” patients are treated in corridors in Britain as crack teams will be sent in to overhaul problem hospitals.
The Health Secretary said leaving sick people languishing on trolleys should not be normalised and signalled he’d go faster on his pledge to eradicate corridor care by the next election.
In an interview with the Sunday Mirror, Mr Streeting said: “I cannot imagine for myself or someone that I love in my own family being on a corridor being remotely dignified. It is certainly undignified, it is certainly less safe, and that’s why we’ve got to get rid of it.”
He added: “I’ve said I want to get rid of this by the end of the Parliament, but if I can do it sooner, I absolutely will and we are keeping a real focus on this.”
READ MORE: Wes Streeting warns Nigel Farage can’t be trusted with the NHS – ‘pack of lies’READ MORE: NHS rolls out semi-autonomous ambulances to tackle deadly 999 delays
Under new plans, teams of experts will be deployed to trusts with the worst rates of corridor care to fix problems. And 40 new and expanded centres have been named across England to ease pressure on stretched A&Es, including in Birmingham, Leicester, Southampton and Stockport.
It comes after a damning report by the Royal College of Nursing described corridor care as a “type of torture” in January. Testimonies from nurses revealed harrowing accounts of staff forced to treat patients in freezing corridors, dining rooms, staff kitchens and offices, with examples of a patient left in a chair for four days, while another died after choking, undetected in a corridor.
Mr Streeting spoke to the Sunday Mirror as he toured Queen’s Hospital in Romford, east London, which was described as a “war zone” last winter after horror scenes of patients lined up in cramped passageways. One corridor had panic buttons and plug sockets installed as it was used so often for patients.
However the hospital has seen marked improvement after introducing a triage scheme where elderly patients in A&E are seen swiftly by specialists before being moved to a same day emergency care centre for frail patients.
Over a nine month period, it has meant 70% of elderly patients were treated somewhere other than A&E, reducing pressure on the department.
Mr Streeting said: “I’ve been around this hospital on some of its worst days, looking people in the eye, both the patients in the beds, but also their loved ones who are waiting in the corridor, and it just makes you feel ashamed. I wouldn’t want someone I love to be in that situation. And that for me is the ultimate test.”
Th plans include 10 new and four expanded urgent treatment centres to treat minor illnesses and injuries such as sprains, cuts and infections.
There will be five new same day emergency care (SDEC) services and 21 expanded same day emergency care services, which provide rapid assessment, diagnosis and treatment for patients with urgent but stable conditions – avoiding unnecessary hospital admissions.
Some will open later this year to beef up capacity ahead of the winter, however a full timetable hasn’t been set out. The £215million funding behind the centres was first announced last year as part of plans to resuscitate urgent and emergency care.
NHS England has now defined corridor care as 45 minutes or more spent in a clinically inappropriate setting like a hallway or a waiting room. Trusts have been ordered to start publishing their data next month.
The Health Secretary said there were signs of green shoots in the NHS, with waiting lists falling, ambulance response times improving, and improvements on four hour waits in A&E.
He said: “These are all signs of an NHS that’s moving in the right direction, and that is how ultimately we’re going to turn around the NHS, get it back on its feet and make it fit for the future.
“It’s not going to be a flick of a switch, overnight transformation. It is consistent, week-by-week, month-by-month, year-on-year, improvement.
“That’s what I’m in this for, and that’s what I’m determined to deliver over the course of this Parliament, so that I can go into the next general election as the Health Secretary saying very confidently to the country, ‘Look, the NHS is so much better than when Labour came in, give us a second term so that we can carry on and finish the job.’ That’s where we’re currently on course to be.”
Mr Streeting insisted the NHS would have the staffing it needs as he rowed in behind Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s immigration reforms, which have sparked anger among some Labour MPs.
Ministers are consulting on plans to double the time to qualify for permanent residence from five to 10 years. The move could apply to people already living in the UK who haven’t already been granted indefinite leave to remain.
Asked about the impact on the NHS, he said: “We are so lucky that we’ve got people from around the world who come to Britain to work in our NHS and social care services. If they all left tomorrow, the services would collapse.
“And I think that the fact that people do come to this country and to contribute in that way should be a cause of celebration.”
But he added: “We have, I think, at times been over reliant on overseas recruitment. We haven’t invested in the training and the development of homegrown talent, and that’s why, for example, we rushed through emergency legislation to prioritize UK trained graduates of medical schools for specialty training places.”
He went on: “I think overall, what the Home Secretary is trying to do is similarly sensible, which is to reduce levels of net migration that at one point were kind of clocking up over a million. Now I’m bleeding heart liberal on immigration. I think immigration has been a really good thing for this country.
“But I think actually, in some ways, it’s those of us who are liberal on immigration who I think have a responsibility to look at the numbers sometimes and go, ‘This is wildly out of proportion, we’ve got to deal with it.’
“That’s what the Home Secretary is trying to do. And of course, we’ve got to do that in a fair way, in a progressive way.”