Cooper Prioritises Children’s Corridor Care Without an Age Count

Health Secretary Yvette Cooper has asked NHS England for urgent plans to end corridor care for children, and to count those cases by age for the first time. On 18 October she also put £140 million into urgent care for a harder winter, after the 2024 death of toddler Finlay Roberts was put to her, and said no child should be treated in a corridor.

NHS England’s published principles already list children among the groups who must not receive that care. Cooper’s request is for new A&E standards and an age split that the official files still omit, in a month when the all-age corridor count was the highest since recording began.

The Rule Against Children in Corridors Is Already on Paper

Corridor care, in NHS England’s definition, is a patient spending at least 45 minutes in a clinically inappropriate part of an emergency department or a general ward. The files treat that as a safety and dignity problem, not a winter quirk, and they sit beside a separate 12-hour wait measure from the decision to admit.

Updated principles, last refreshed in June, say corridor care is unacceptable and must not be treated as normal. They also name groups for whom it should not be used at all, and children sit at the top of that list. Cooper’s “no child should be treated in a corridor” line matches a rule trusts have already been told to follow.

THE GROUPS NHS ENGLAND SAYS MUST NEVER WAIT IN CORRIDORS

• Children: The same principles call the practice never acceptable when caring for children.
• Mental health: Patients in mental health crisis are listed beside children as a group to keep out of makeshift bays.
• Learning disability and autism: People with learning disabilities, neurodivergence or autism are named for the same reason.
• Dementia and frailty: Patients with dementia, confusion, delirium or severe frailty are on the list, as are those who are pregnant or breastfeeding.
• Infection and high NEWS2: Anyone infectious, or with a National Early Warning Score 2 above 5, is also barred from corridor placement.

The same document still tells staff what to do if a corridor is used in extremis for other patients, which is how the practice has stayed in daily use. A snapshot from the Trainee Emergency Research Network, covering 165 A&E departments across the UK in March 2025, found almost 7% of children in specialist paediatric A&E treated in waiting rooms, ambulance bays or corridors, and 15% of children who were admitted across all emergency departments treated in those spaces. NHS England has said that snapshot is more than 18 months old and does not match current practice. It has not replaced it with a live children’s series of its own.

What Happened to Finlay Roberts at Whittington Hospital?

Finlay was 2 years and 11 months when his parents, David and Liz Roberts, took him to the paediatric emergency department at Whittington Hospital in north London. Senior coroner Mary Hassell, sitting in Inner North London, found he died of a sigmoid volvulus, a twisted bowel that is rare in a child and a recognised natural cause. Different care that night, she wrote, would have given him a chance.

FINLAY ROBERTS AND THE WHITTINGTON NIGHT

1. 11 July 2024: His parents bring him in with tummy ache, on the family GP’s advice, to a paediatric A&E the coroner later called understaffed and extremely busy.
2. That evening: The family spend hours in a corridor and a public area. Liz is told to give him a suppository there. David later said Finlay “just clung to me, as we now know, slowly dying.”
3. 12 July 2024, about 1am: Finlay is discharged home. Hassell found serial nursing observations were not done, not all tests were carried out, and advice sought from Great Ormond Street Hospital was not obtained before he left, after late x-rays and a broken loop of communication.
4. 12 July 2024, about 8am: Liz finds him lifeless in the bed beside her. He dies the same day, a month before his third birthday, after attempts to revive him at home and back at the Whittington.
5. 9 June 2025: The inquest ends. Hassell records the twisted bowel as the cause and states it is unclear whether different hospital care would have saved him.
6. 20 June 2025: She sends a prevention of future deaths report to the trust, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine and the Royal College of Nursing, warning that missing paediatric observations may be wider than one hospital.

Hassell noted that the Whittington had added nursing staff in paediatric A&E after Finlay’s death. She also wrote that doctors there had treated observations as acceptable because nobody flagged them as missing, then discharged him without the final set the discharging doctor had wanted. Cooper apologised to the parents on behalf of the NHS. “No child should be treated in a corridor. No patient should be treated in a corridor,” she said.

Corridor care robs people of their dignity when they are at their most vulnerable.

Liz Roberts, Finlay’s mother, speaking after her son’s death

Whittington Health NHS Trust offered condolences and said it still sees spells of exceptional demand, when some patients receive care in temporary clinical areas, including corridors. David called the night a “terrible mess.” The family were moved into a room with a bed, then back into the corridor.

September Logged 99,290 Corridor Instances

NHS England only began publishing monthly corridor care situation reports in June, using May as the first month. The series is experimental. It still has no children’s column, which is the gap Cooper has now ordered closed.

CORRIDOR CARE IN ENGLAND, MAY AND SEPTEMBER

September was the highest month since the files opened, 400 more patients a day than in May. The Royal College of Nursing, citing those NHS England totals, logged 99,290 instances of corridor care and said the practice is entrenched as winter approaches. A year of new guidance, extra money and specialist teams sent into struggling trusts has not brought that daily average down.

Those corridor figures are not the same as the long trolley wait. In September, 50,582 people in England waited more than 12 hours from the decision to admit them to actually getting a bed, up from 44,951 in August. Cooper said child health had been treated as a secondary concern, alongside maternity, and that she wanted it to sit higher on the NHS list.

Buildings, Ambulances and One Children’s A&E

The Department of Health and Social Care, on the same Sunday, announced £140 million for 14 urgent care schemes across England, from urgent treatment centres and same-day emergency care to ambulance fleets and emergency department upgrades. Several of the line items run over two, three or four years, so the whole sum is not cash for this winter alone. The department placed the package inside almost £2 billion of urgent care capital projects until 2030, on top of £1.5 billion confirmed so far for urgent maintenance.

WHERE THE LARGEST CHEQUES GO

Romford is the only scheme in the table that names a Children’s A&E. The rest is adult flow, vehicles and digital triage. Shadow health secretary Damian Hinds said the government needed to act and asked it to explain where the money was coming from.

A further 25 new or expanded urgent care sites promised in April were billed as open for winter. The department’s own status table on 18 October listed 17 as open and 8 as not yet open, with dates running through November, December and into January 2027. Cooper said winter would be more challenging after a heavy summer, and that the NHS had been preparing since July.

Sixteen Health Groups Wanted Whole-System Action

On 16 October, 16 health groups including Age UK, Marie Curie and the Royal College of Nursing wrote to Cooper. They said corridor care is incompatible with NHS care standards and would take whole-system action to end, not a single winter package. Older patients and people at the end of life were in that letter for a reason: they occupy a large share of the blocked beds that push children, and everyone else, into corridors.

RCN England’s executive director Patricia Marquis called the extra money welcome and then “just another sticking plaster on a system that is at breaking point.” She said the nursing workforce needed to deliver the new services “goes into winter already running on empty and short of staff.” Buildings do not take observations. Finlay’s inquest turned on that point.

The corridor care crisis in our hospitals doesn’t end without game-changing investment in the nursing workforce and system wide solutions. We must immediately build capacity in community services and in social care so we can treat people closer to home and discharge patients who are ready to leave hospital.

Professor Nicola Ranger, RCN general secretary and chief executive, 8 October 2026

Pressed on patients still in hospital after they were medically ready to leave, Cooper backed tighter links between hospitals, community teams and social care. She defended a longer-term National Care Service, including free personal care, and did not give a start date when challenged. Children’s corridor care is the political cut of that knot. The bed that a child needs is often still holding an adult who should have gone home.

Flu Jabs and a Winter Cooper Calls Harder

THE PRESSURE INTO WINTER

• Summer A&E: Almost 7.3 million people attended A&E in England between June and August, the highest summer figure on the books.
• The waiting list: An estimated 7.37 million treatments were waiting at the end of August, for 6.24 million patients, the highest since October 2025.
• Flu jabs: 7.4 million flu vaccinations had been delivered in England by 11 October, and more children had been vaccinated than last year.
• The 18-week aim: Cooper said the manifesto pledge that 92% of patients start treatment within 18 weeks of booking by 2029 “remains our manifesto commitment” and is “something stretching that we work towards.”

NHS medical director Prof Frankie Swords said earlier this month there were ominous signs of winter pressure already, with more patients arriving in A&E with flu and other respiratory viruses than usual for the time of year. The King’s Fund warned of a twin crisis, with little recovery time for staff between peak periods. Dr Emma Rowland, NHS executive director for performance and delivery, said winter would be tough and asked eligible people to come forward for flu and other winter vaccines.

Cooper’s children’s plan will be judged on whether the next set of corridor files finally shows an age line, and whether that line falls. Until those numbers exist, the health service is still asking the public to take on trust a promise about children that its own rules already made, in hospitals that put 400 more people a day into corridors in September than they did in May.