Queen's Hospital Romford corridor care cut by quarter but 1,500 patients a month still affected
Queen's Hospital in Romford has cut corridor care by 25%, but about 1,500 patients a month are still treated in corridors, ITV News reports.
How it was covered
- ITV was the only channel found covering it, concentrating on its own corridor care investigation and the gap between claimed progress and reality.
- Channel 5, BBC News, BBC One, BBC Two, Channel 4, GB News and Sky News: not found in tracked broadcasts.
The Full Story
A plain summary built from the channels that reported this story. Facts only one channel reported are attributed to it.
ITV News health correspondent Rebecca Barry returned to Queen's Hospital in Romford a year after the channel's footage of elderly and vulnerable patients in corridors prompted an investigation into what it called a national scandal. The hospital says it has cut corridor care by a quarter since then, and the exact corridor shown in last year's footage is now clear.
But ITV News reported that the pressure remains. By 11am, Barry's team counted 10 people lying on trolleys in corridors, and one man had been there for 13 hours. Valerie, 88, had come in with chest pains and had waited four hours in a busy corridor. She said it was 'not right', and her children said she had been scared to come to hospital because she did not want to be in a corridor. ITV News reported that she was still in A&E when its team returned three hours later.
The report also found Tony, 84, who has Parkinson's, lying in a busy walkway with no privacy under bright lights for eight hours. His wife, Linda, said the corridors were 'stacked up with old people' and that the fault lay with the government rather than staff. ITV News said the couple had appeared in its footage from last year, when Tony was left for 18 hours in a corridor waiting for a ward bed.
A hospital leader told ITV News that returning to the corridor had been difficult and that the practice was 'immoral' and 'undignified', but ITV News reported that corridor care still affects about 1,500 people at the hospital every month. The hospital says a unit diverting frail elderly patients from A&E has helped cut the number on corridors by a quarter since winter. ITV News reported that the A&E department was built 20 years ago to treat about 300 patients a day but now regularly sees double that, and that it has been told it will receive £42 million to rebuild. A new building alone would not resolve the backlog caused by long waits for social care, it reported.
The government has promised to end corridor care within three years. ITV News said the hospital is not alone in the problem and that staff described the work as tiring and relentless.
Key Claims
Claims reported during this story's coverage, grouped by how many channels reported each one. Select a dot to see the source excerpt.
| Claim |  |
|---|---|
| Only on one channel | |
| Around 1,500 patients per month continue to receive care in corridors at the hospital. | |
| Corridor care at the hospital has fallen by 25% compared with the previous year. | |
| During its visit, ITV observed 10 people lying on trolleys in corridors. | |
| The A&E department was designed for around 300 patients a day but now regularly sees about double that number. | |
Channel Perspectives
What each channel focused on, with key quotes.
ITV1's coverage was led by its own year-long investigation and health correspondent Rebecca Barry, who returned to Queen's Hospital to test the hospital's claim that corridor care had been cut by a quarter. The tone was sombre and sceptical: the clear corridor was set against new footage of trolleys, patient testimony from Valerie and Tony's wife, Linda, and staff exhaustion. The evening and late bulletins added the £42 million rebuild, the A&E capacity mismatch and the government's three-year promise.
- “Bosses say treatment in corridors has been cut by a quarter”
- “Those corridors are stacked up with old people”
- “It's not the way to have a medical service, really”
Broadcast Timeline
News broadcasts tracked for this story, in time order.