Wes Streeting humiliated live on Good Morning Britain over NHS 'corridor care'

Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Wes Streeting was given an embarrassing 1 out of 5 rating for his efforts to end corridor care in hospitals. Despite government promises it continues to be a huge issue across the country and the President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Dr Ian Higginson appeared on Good Morning Britain to warn that the practice has been alarmingly ”normalised” before delivering the damning verdict.

Speaking to presenters Richard Madeley and Ranvir Singh Dr Higginson said: "Although our patients (have) come to expect corridor care, I don't think it's fair to say that they're not outraged by it when they experience it... And our staff and my members continue to be outraged about it... I don't get any sense of urgency about political solutions in the pipeline to this across any of those four nations, and I do not hear senior leaders within the NHS having the courage to speak out about the extent of this problem within their organisations."

He continued: "It takes organisations like ourselves to point out how normalised it's become... We have meal rounds for patients meal trolleys go around hospital corridors to look after patients.

"We have nurses employed looking after patients in corridors, and this should not be happening. It wouldn't be acceptable in any other part of the hospital. It wouldn't be acceptable in any other industry... (so to) allow it to happen in our emergency departments...that's what we're all really angry about," he fumed.

Laying the blame firmly at the feet of the government and their policies he said: "This has all been about failures in health policy, which is squarely at the doors of political leaders. We've been cutting the number of hospital beds and also failing to look into an obvious future and set up all the social and community care that's needed to back up hospitals...

"What it's meant is that...we tend to concentrate our patients into very few hospitals. It's not done in quite such a concentrated way across the world. What it means is that our hospitals are absolutely full to bursting."

Expanding on what he meant he said: "The really rubbish thing about this all is that we've known this has been happening for years. We've seen it coming for years, and yet we've not been investing in the long term solutions... [We need to get] our act together around social and community care, so the patients who don't need to be in hospital have somewhere to go, which will free up beds.

"We need to actually generate more beds within our hospitals. We can't keep closing them. We have to...find a way to open up more beds... And we also need to get our hospitals working effectively across the working week, so that we don't close down the acute sector, say, on Saturdays and Sundays, we keep it working flat out so that we can keep our patients as safe as possible once they get into hospital. Those three things are probably the key elements [to solving the problem]."

Asked by Singh how he would rate Wes Streeting's efforts he issued the embarrassing appraisal.

"I would give the governments across the four nations at the moment one star for the way that they've been proactively approaching this problem... What I'd love to see is them up to five stars. That's what we all want. We're ready to provide advice on how to do it, as are a number of other organisations," he said.