New report says NI has highest number of patients being treated in corridors - sadly unsurprising.
December 12th 2025
When hospital care in crowded emergency departments is delivered in areas not originally designed for this use, these adapted spaces are known as ‘escalation areas’, the most notorious of which are hospital corridors. A recent report from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine looked at a range of expected activity at 165 UK emergency departments (EDs) in March 2025 and found that on average almost 18% of ED patients were receiving care in escalation areas, while “the proportion of patients in escalation areas was consistently highest in Northern Ireland” (31.8–38.8%).
This disgraceful situation did not happen by accident, it happened by design, under the cuts arising from the Review of Public Administration, and the Comprehensive Spending Review. The health service was plundered, with hundreds of millions pounds in budget cuts, and bed, ward, and staff cuts. Then came the privatisation of the home care services, plus the closure of Emergency Departments across the health and social care system.
Be in no doubt: while the services have already been cut to the bone, they plan to make more efficiency savings.
Patients are not getting the services they need, and staff are being placed in an intolerable and unacceptable environment. If this situation does not improve dramatically, healthcare settings will be dangerous places for patients and staff.
People are quite rightly asking when our hospital senior management and boards are going to tell the minister and the department of health, enough is enough. It’s time to stop tinkering around with the service and the health and wellbeing of the staff and the citizens of Northern Ireland, and treat the root cause, which has been the underfunding and undermining of the principles of the National Health Service. Political leaders must set their own agendas aside and stop the destruction of the health and social care services.
People’s lives are at stake if this continues. We need to fight for our health service because we all need it at some point in our lives including family, friends, and neighbours.
