Our plan to end the A&E corridor crisis

30,000. That’s how many people wait for over 12 hours in A&E departments every single week.

It’s a national scandal, and it’s worse than ever.

Thousands of patients are lying on trolleys in corridors for hours on end. No privacy. No dignity.

There have even been tragic cases of people dying on those trolleys and left undiscovered for hours.

The A&E corridor crisis has to end. And today, we’ve set out a plan to end it.

With our package, the government could end the scandal of 12-hour A&E waits altogether by the end of this year. And we’d put a legal duty on the Health Secretary to deliver it.

That is the kind of real change our country needs, and it’s the kind of change the Liberal Democrats will keep fighting for.

We are the only party offering a real plan to fix our NHS. The Conservatives can’t – they caused this crisis in the first place. Labour can’t – things are getting worse on their watch. And Nigel Farage just wants to privatise the NHS and turn our United Kingdom into Trump’s America.

Only the Liberal Democrats are standing up for patients and fighting to save our NHS. 

Because never again should a single person have to watch their loved one die on a trolley in a hospital corridor.

The Liberal Democrats’s proposals would make 6,000 extra hospital beds available to end corridor care through £1.5bn of new investment

• 1,000 more staffed hospital beds.
• Extra investment in social care to reserve 1,600 “safety net” social care places each day, for hospitals to discharge into if they need to.
• Extra intermediate/step down care packages to free up another 1,200 beds a day.
• Free up 2,500 beds through other measures to reduce readmissions and cut the length of hospital stays:
  • Expanding the use of the Discharge Medicines Service and High Intensity Use Services, both of which have been proven to reduce readmissions.
  • Introducing a Carer Support Service in every hospital, helping to get people home quicker.
  • Guaranteeing every hospice can meet local needs, with funding allocated so no patient in need of hospice care is turned away.
• Extra investment in patient transport services, discharge hubs, administrative support including additional ward clerks, and surges of locum staff during discharge bottlenecks where required.

The party has also called for a new law to end 12-hour waits in A&E and corridor care, and a legal duty on ministers  to deliver on it.

The new guarantee that no patient will wait longer than 12 hours from arriving in A&E to being admitted, transferred or discharged would be enshrined in the NHS Constitution, which already sets out a number of other patients’ rights. That would place a legal duty on the Government and the NHS to put the policies and resources in place to achieve them.