Cooper orders NHS to end child corridor care — SkimNews
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- Yvette Cooper asked the NHS to draft urgent plans to end "corridor care" for children, prioritizing the effort ahead of the government's wider pledge to eliminate the practice for all patients by the end of this parliament
- Cooper announced £140m for 14 urgent care schemes across England — covering new urgent care centres, ambulance fleets and A&E upgrades — ahead of a winter she described as "more difficult" than usual
- New A&E standards for children in England will be introduced, with corridor care data collected by age for the first time
- Finlay Roberts, aged two, died in 2024 after hours spent in an A&E corridor at the Whittington Health NHS Trust in north London before being discharged; his mother told the BBC she was asked to administer a suppository to him in the corridor
- Almost 7.3 million people attended A&E in England between June and August — the highest summer figure on record — with an estimated 7.37 million treatments waiting at the end of August for 6.24 million patients
- Age UK, Marie Curie and the Royal College of Nursing wrote to Cooper calling corridor care "fundamentally incompatible" with NHS standards; the RCN called the £140m "just another sticking plaster on a system that is at breaking point"
- The King's Fund warned the NHS faces a "twin crisis" entering winter, with medical director Prof Frankie Swords citing "ominous" early signs of flu and respiratory virus pressure on hospitals
Why it matters: Children become the first patient group singled out for corridor care reform, pulling that work ahead of the government's end-of-parliament pledge for all patients. But the RCN's "sticking plaster" verdict and the King's Fund's "twin crisis" warning make clear £140m split across 14 schemes is unlikely on its own to fix an A&E system that just logged its busiest summer on record.
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