A&E patients left in the dark and on broken beds for 24 hours – NHS corridor care laid bare in damning new report
A person died while waiting on a trolley in a hospital corridor, while diabetic patients were left for hours without food, a damning review into NHS corridor care has revealed.
Other sick patients were left on broken beds in pitch-black corridors for 24 hours with no privacy, according to a review of patient care in emergency departments in December by the group Healthwatch England.
They made up just some of the more than 2.3 million A&E visits, with about 400,000 people admitted to hospital, in December, when 19,000 resident doctors went on strike for five days, putting hospitals under even greater pressure than usual.
One in four people (137,763) in December waited for more than four hours between admission and staff finding them a bed, while one in 10 (50,775) waited more than 12 hours. That’s almost 50,000 more patients than the NHS target for a maximum of 22% of people waiting over four hours.
Among those who said they had waited – on chairs, trolleys, or even the floor in non-clinical areas when no beds were available – was a patient from Essex with a chronic lung condition. They said they had a 24-hour wait in A&E for a bed on a ward, but were given a “broken bed in a pitch-black corridor”.
Another patient, in a wheelchair with osteoporosis, said they had “no buzzer” and discharged themselves at 5am following the “traumatising” experience.
An elderly patient, from Havering, told Healthwatch that the person next to them died while they were waiting for 40 hours on a trolley in a corridor, adding that they had “no dignity” and found it “very scary”.
Source: The Independent, 11 February 2026
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