Hospitals left a record 518,000 patients languishing on emergency trolleys for 12 hours or more last year, damning figures reveal.
The rate is 400 times higher than the 1,306 reported a decade ago and comes amid a severe bed shortage that is preventing staff from transferring new arrivals to wards.
It shows emergency departments were already dangerously overwhelmed before this winter’s flu outbreak emerged, forcing around 20 trusts to declare “critical incidents”.
NHS England said an average of 5,408 patients per day were in hospital with flu last week, including 256 in intensive care.
This number is thought to increase now that children have returned to school, where they risk contracting the virus and bringing it home to their vulnerable families and relatives.
Carrie Johnson, wife of former Prime Minister Boris, revealed over the weekend that she spent the first week of 2025 in an NHS hospital suffering from flu and pneumonia.
He said he had been struggling to breathe properly during a “nasty” infection that lasted almost 18 days and urged the public to get a flu vaccine.
Figures to be published this Thursday are expected to show the NHS is enduring its worst flu season in a decade.
The rate is 400 times higher than the 1,306 reported a decade ago and comes amid a severe bed shortage that is preventing staff from transferring new arrivals to wards (file image)

Joanna Ormesher tweeted this photograph of the main corridor at the Royal Blackburn Hospital in Lancashire yesterday, saying: ‘Patients abandoned in cold corridors to be gawked at like exhibits in a zoo. No patient dignity and poor patient care. Shameful at best’

Emergency and ambulance services suffered their busiest year in 2024, with teams dealing with more incidents in December than any previous month.

It comes as the Labor Party was accused last night of being “asleep at the wheel” during the crisis, which is expected to deepen this week.
Professor Phil Banfield, president of the British Medical Association, described care in corridors as “undignified” and “unsafe”, and warning scenes inside NHS hospitals are now “similar to those seen in countries in development”.
He said hundreds of patients suffer preventable harm and death every week, and some die before even being seen by doctors.
Some emergencies are operating at more than 200 percent capacity, with waits of up to 50 hours for a bed and ambulances in queues of 18 people outside waiting to deliver new arrivals.
Last week, Whittington Hospital in north London ran multiple adverts asking nurses to work overtime providing “hallway care” to patients on trolleys.
And NHS trusts across the country are installing plugs and oxygen lines in corridors as they prepare to treat more patients on trolleys along their walls.
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) said corridors are “open, noisy, brightly lit and often cold”, making it “difficult, if not impossible”, for patients to rest.
He emphasized that it is “not possible” to control the spread of infection in them, that it is “challenging” for staff to monitor patients and that “privacy, dignity and confidentiality are not maintained.”
The RCEM warns that long waits in A&E are extremely dangerous and are estimated to have contributed to 14,000 deaths in 2023. Meanwhile, A&E and ambulance services suffered their busiest year in 2024 with teams dealing with more incidents in December than in any previous month.
Last year there were a record 518,213 waits of 12 hours or more in A&E (timed from the moment doctors made the decision to admit the patient) according to an analysis of NHS England data by the Liberal Democrats.

NHS trusts across the country are installing plugs and oxygen lines in corridors as they prepare to treat more patients on trolleys along their walls (file image)

Last year there were a record 518,213 waits of 12 hours or more in the emergency room, calculated from the moment doctors made the decision to admit the patient.

A row of ambulances parked at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital earlier this week.
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This represents an increase of more than 100,000 (25 percent) compared to the previous year, when there were 415,136.
In stark contrast, there were only 1,306 such waits in all of 2015, fewer than now occur in a single day.
Helen Morgan, the Liberal Democrats’ health and social care spokesperson, urged Health Secretary Wes Streeting to draw up an emergency plan to tackle “shocking and dangerous” A&E waiting times, saying the Government “seems to be asleep at the wheel.”
He said it must include an immediate increase in the number of hospital beds to reduce occupancy rates to a safe level, normally considered 85 percent.
The RCEM said it is currently at 93 per cent, meaning the NHS needs 9,471 more.
Last week an average of 12,591 hospital beds in England were filled each day with patients deemed medically fit for discharge but unable to leave. Many will have been waiting for a place in a nursing home or for care to be arranged in their own home.
Dr Tim Cooksley, immediate past president of the Society of Intensive Care Medicine, said elderly patients left in hallways suffer greater harm, including “delirium, pressure sores and psychological distress”.
He added: “Patient trust in the NHS is rapidly deteriorating and this is well founded.”
“The worsening of the current winter crisis observed last week was predictable and inevitable.”
Professor Banfield described the crisis as a “national emergency” and added: “There are people, some elderly and vulnerable, waiting in emergency departments much longer than we could have imagined a few years ago and this is causing avoidable harm. and preventable”. deceased.
‘If this were still a pandemic, Cobra (called to handle national emergency matters) would mobilize. Why doesn’t losing the equivalent of a planeload of patients every month trigger the same sense of urgency?’
Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, described the figures as “staggering” and the situation in A&E as “tough”.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We inherited a broken NHS, and in our first six months we have taken steps to protect emergency departments this winter, introducing the new RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) vaccine, administering more vaccines against flu than last year, and ending strikes so staff are on the front line and not on picket lines during the first winter in three years.
“It will take time, but we are working to get out of this cycle of annual winter crises and will shortly publish an urgent care recovery plan.”