Corridors are no place to die, but that is what is happening in British hospitals now as the worst winter crisis in years crams every corner and cupboard in A&Es with very sick patients waiting for beds. Some die on trolleys and chairs, nurses report to their Royal College. They talk of “straddling a patient doing CPR while everyone watches on”. The Whittington hospital in north London and Queen’s hospital in Romford, Essex, have both advertised for “corridor care” nurses. The heath secretary, Wes Streeting, says he will never allow this to become “normalised” as it did under the previous government.
But the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine suggests it already has, declaring: “This must be a watershed moment.” Last week, 20 hospitals declared “critical incidents”, because they were unable to cope with the demand for care. For nurses, the crisis means changing frail, incontinent patients beside vending machines and treating people in storerooms, car parks, offices and toilets, sometimes with just one nurse and one healthcare assistant coping with 20 or 30 patients in spaces blocked with trolleys. Barking, Redbridge and Havering NHS trust has resorted to putting up posters in its corridors asking people to lobby their MPs for £35m to make its A&E capable of coping with double the number of patients it was built for. It so happens that one of their MPs is Streeting.
Labour always knew how harsh its inheritance would be, but bad luck sees an already perilously fragile NHS hit simultaneously by freezing weather and an unprecedented “quad-demic” of flu, Covid-19, norovirus and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). NHS England chief nursing officer Duncan Burton calls this winter “one of the toughest the NHS has experienced”.
The underlying problems are well known. The number of hospital beds in England has more than halved in recent years, reports the King’s Fund, “while the number of patients treated has increased significantly”, and “the UK has fewer acute beds relative to its population than many comparable health systems”. Thanks to George Osborne, who first axed training places for nurses, then bursaries, cohorts of staff are missing. Most voters know this, which is why the fate of the NHS was one of the key reasons for ejecting the Tories at the last election. A YouGov poll this week asks who is most to blame for the state of the country. By 38% to 22%, people still blame the last government more than Labour.
The present crisis has one cause that could have been largely averted: the continuing fall in uptake of vaccines. Here’s an alarming indicator of the change in attitudes: the number of NHS staff vaccinated fell again this year, so by the time the quad-demic blew in at the end of last year only 35% had a flu injection, down from 62% in the same month in pre-pandemic 2019. Only 18.4% of staff had their Covid booster – yet they are the ones who have seen so many Covid deaths in the last two winters. Surely they know that vaccinations reduce hospitalisation from infectious diseases – for influenza, that’s by 30-74%.
Flu and Covid jabs are free for the over-65s and vulnerable people, but uptake has been too low. Writing in the BMJ, Lindsay Broadbent, a professor in virology, says they should be free for everyone. The Office of Health Economics calls for employers to provide workplace vaccination schemes, as respiratory infections cost UK businesses over £44bn a year in productivity losses.
Some vaccinations are also free for children, partly because they, especially the youngest, are the greatest spreaders. But children’s vaccination rates are falling alarmingly. In 2024, the number of children receiving a first dose of the MMR vaccine fell to 88.9% in England, the lowest level for 14 years, resulting in significant measles outbreaks. For adolescents, the HPV (human papilloma virus) vaccination rate has fallen by 16.7% from pre-Covid rates.
Conspiracies and scares are increasingly stirred in a low-trust, anti-establishment mood, and not just on social media: the tiny proportion of people killed or harmed by vaccinations receive far more news coverage than those saved by them, and it is often not balanced by warnings about the urgent need to get Covid, flu and RSV jabs. Every vaccine, like any medical treatment, always carries a small level of risk – but it needs a louder counter-blast to put it in perspective. The tragic irony is that just as vaccines are taking another giant leap forward, with glimmerings even of one for cancer, too many of the public are turning away.
Prof Ivan Browne, who for decades was in charge of Leicester’s public health, mourns the loss of the cross-system collaborations he was renowned for setting up during the Covid pandemic, with networks of trusted community characters who could counter vaccine fears and misinformation locally. He says they can’t persuade adamant anti-vaxxers, but can reach most of the hesitant delayers. We need to “shore up those community links we still have”, he tells me. “GPs are too hard-pressed on their own, so everyone took their eye off the ball.” He says he has seen virtually no effective government messaging encouraging vaccinations.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has chosen as his health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr, who repeated the false claim that vaccines cause autism, urged parents not to jab their children and had to apologise after claiming that the number of people injured by vaccines was “a holocaust”.
That may send more waves of anti-vaxx messages. But anyone eligible who wants to get their missing vaccinations on the NHS can find local walk-in pharmacies here.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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