Scotland's Health Secretary Angela Constance said treating patients on corridors is "not acceptable" as a senior emergency doctor warned that accident and emergency units can no longer guarantee safe care. The exchange, aired ahead of winter, highlights a measurement gap: the Scottish Government does not yet publish routine statistics on corridor care even as clinicians describe it as normalised.
Dr Iain Kennedy, a GP and British Medical Association Scotland council chair speaking in a personal capacity on the BBC's Sunday Show, said staff were "absolutely terrified" by conditions in emergency departments. Constance, writing separately in The Scotsman, argued the NHS is "tangled in bureaucracy" and defended plans to reduce mainland health boards from 14 to two as part of a wider reform package.
Winter plans under scrutiny
Constance unveiled winter preparedness measures days before the broadcast interview, but Kennedy said many elements repeat annual rituals that do not match the scale of pressure. Bed blocking — patients ready for discharge but stuck in hospital because social care is unavailable — continues to clog medical wards and backs up A&E. Constance acknowledged the link and pointed to £2.3 billion of Scottish Government investment in social care integration, while also citing austerity, Brexit and living costs as external headwinds.
Counting what hurts
Constance told the programme she wants to remedy the absence of corridor-care statistics. Without consistent data, ministers and opposition MSPs debate anecdotes; boards cannot benchmark improvement. England publishes wider A&E performance metrics; Scotland's gap makes it harder to judge whether winter money is changing front-line experience.
Reform politics loom. The SNP's board consolidation proposal faces pushback from local campaigners who fear remote governance. Constance framed the choice as existential: "If we do not change, we run the risk of losing everything we have worked so hard to build," she wrote, referring to the post-war NHS settlement.
What patients face
Corridor care is not a branding problem; it signals capacity failure across the stack — primary care access, ambulance handover delays, staffed beds and domiciliary support. Kennedy's safety language is unusually blunt for a system that prefers coded performance reports. It puts Constance in the position of agreeing morally while defending a restructuring timeline measured in years.
Monday's headlines pair a ministerial promise to measure corridor care with a clinician saying measurement is overdue because harm is already occurring. Winter will test whether new money and board mergers translate into empty trolleys — or whether Scotland's A&E crisis remains a corridor story without a dashboard.