Beccy Cooper MP: speeches

Speeches

• 8 Jul 2026 · NHS Corridor Care · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan) for bringing this timely and important debate to the Chamber. As we have heard, corridor care is one of the clearest signs of wider pressures across urgent and emergency care services, including rising demand, delayed discharge and constrained hospital capacity. As so much has already been said, I want to focus my remarks on a couple of areas. As an MP for a coastal community, I want to make it clear to the Minister that when we are looking at these pressures, we need to acknowledge the additional pressures facing specific communities. Coastal communities tend to have older populations and poorer health outcomes. Worthing West sits within one of England’s coastal communities. Its population is older than average—even though I am not older than average—frailty is increasing, multiple long-term conditions are common, emergency admissions are correspondingly higher, recruitment is harder and deprivation exists alongside affluence. All these things contribute to the pressures that we have discussed during the debate. University Hospitals Sussex NHS foundation trust is in my constituency. As we have discussed, NHS England’s data is not completely useful in many instances, but it is the best that we have. I have had a look and, on average, the four emergency departments in the trust are seeing 65 patients in their emergency department corridor care service each day. In their general and acute wards, they have corridor care for 39 patients each day. That is not insubstantial. We have talked about the back door, but I really want to talk about the front door. Members will be unsurprised to hear that, as a public health doctor, I know that prevention is a corridor care policy. The Government need to ensure that investment in prevention and public health is recognised as part of the solution to reducing corridor care. We have to reduce the flow of avoidable illness into our hospitals in the first place, and that means tackling smoking, poor housing, air pollution, obesity, loneliness, poverty and delayed access to community care. Corridor care begins long before a patient reaches an accident and emergency department.