BEDS - End corridor care in A and E

15/03/2026

14/03/2026

This is not about blaming staff – they are doing everything they can in impossible conditions. We owe it to them, and to patients, to start having honest conversations about corridor care, centralisation and the loss of community beds. If you care about our NHS and the people working in it, please watch this and share.

14/03/2026

News from Betsi Cadwaladr this week paints a very mixed picture.

On the one hand, work is finally due to start on the new development at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Rhyl, with a minor injuries unit, a 14‑bed “ready‑to‑go‑home” reablement ward and expanded radiology and dental services promised by 2027. Any extra local capacity is welcome – our staff and communities deserve it – but it is nowhere near enough to fix the crisis that patients and frontline workers are living through right now.

At the same time, BCUHB are preparing for an S4C “Y Byd ar Bedwar” programme on corridor care in North Wales’ Emergency Departments – a practice that the RCN and others have warned is becoming embedded rather than exceptional. The Health Board says it “fully acknowledges” the concerns around corridor care, and points to “unrelenting demand”, “patient flow” and “safe discharge” as the reasons. We agree with them on one key point: none of this is the fault of frontline staff, who continue to provide compassionate care in impossible conditions.

But we also need to be honest. This situation did not appear out of nowhere. For years, BCUHB and Welsh Government have pursued a policy of centralisation while allowing community hospitals and step‑down beds to close or sit mothballed, even as hundreds of medically fit patients wait on acute wards for somewhere safe to go. Retired consultants, unions and local campaigners have all warned that the loss of community beds across Conwy, Denbigh, Ruthin, Prestatyn, Blaenau Ffestiniog, Llangollen, Flint, Rhyl, Colwyn Bay, Tywyn and Penley would drive exactly the kind of overcrowding, long ambulance waits and corridor care we are now seeing.

Something needs to change. Not next year. Not “in the coming months”. Now.

If BCUHB wants to be taken seriously when it talks about “improvement” and “learning from best practice”, it should start with some clear, concrete commitments:

- Confirm that the freed‑up Abergele Hospital ward will be used for step‑down / intermediate care, not quietly repurposed or left idle.

- Re‑open the Tywyn inpatient ward and work with staff and communities on a credible workforce plan rather than writing the beds off.

- Work with the Rainbow Foundation to get the Penley beds back into use as part of a properly resourced community rehab network.

- Take a serious look at options for bringing the mothballed ward at Denbigh Infirmary back into service for step‑down and rehabilitation.

And if BCUHB believes these things cannot or should not be done, then they must explain why – in public, in plain language, with evidence. Not hidden away in never‑ending “engagement” exercises where key information is missing, not in workshops where whole communities are under‑represented, and not in glossy reports full of invented corporate phrases like “patient flow”, “bed blocking” and “reablement”.

People in North Wales deserve an honest conversation about corridor care, centralisation and community beds – a conversation based on facts, not spin. Our ask is simple: stop shutting the public out, start using the beds and buildings we already have, and work with staff, patients and partners to build a system that keeps people safe, close to home and treated with dignity.

09/03/2026

The Pillow Palaver – Is It All Just Fluffed-Up Nonsense?

This weekend, a poster started circulating on social media asking for ‘donations of pillows’ to Ysbyty Glan Clwyd. Many of us paused — surely this couldn’t be real? We’re grateful to MS Darren Miller for stepping in and writing to BCUHB for clarity. So far, it remains unclear whether the request came from someone trying to genuinely help, or if it was simply a hoax. What we do know is that it definitely didn’t come through official channels.

Either way, the advice is simple: please don’t donate bedding or money to the NHS. That’s not how things should work.

On Monday, BCUHB issued an official statement to say there isn’t a shortage of pillows at any major hospital. That should have been reassuring — but instead, the comments section told a very different story. Patients, relatives, and even staff chimed in, many saying they’d personally experienced shortages. Here at BEDS, we’ve heard first-hand accounts of patients left for hours — sometimes days — in corridors without a single pillow.

So what’s the big fuss? Surely there are more important things to worry about than a few missing pillows?
Well... yes and no.

On the surface, it might look trivial — but this small story pulls back the sheet on something far bigger.

Firstly, it highlights just how wide the gap has become between health board officials and those on the frontline. How can management be unaware of something as simple, visible, and measurable as whether patients have pillows? Is it denial — or deceit? Either way, it speaks volumes about a deeper issue: a culture that seems allergic to honesty and transparency. How is the public meant to trust a health board that won’t even admit when basic comfort items are short?

And let’s be clear — this isn’t *just* about comfort. Pillows matter.

Elderly, frail, and seriously unwell patients are often sitting for hours in A&E on hard plastic chairs, sometimes waiting overnight. Without proper cushioning, they’re at risk of painful pressure sores that can quickly become infected and significantly worsen recovery outcomes.

Pillows are also essential for rest and healing. Sleep isn’t a luxury — it’s a clinical necessity. Poor sleep contributes to slower recovery, weakened immunity, and increased pain. A lack of basic comfort directly affects both the patient’s wellbeing *and* their clinical outcomes.

So yes — on the face of it, it may sound like a fuss over nothing but pillows. But this “Pillow Palaver” is just another symptom of something much darker.

If honesty, dignity, and basic care are slipping through the cracks to this extent, what hope is there for trust in those tasked with fixing the system? Until the culture of denial and deflection changes, we’ll keep seeing new signs of the same disease — and patients, once again, will be the ones left lying flat.

Call to action:
As we head into elections, ask your representatives and local election candidates what they plan to do to improve A&E now. Don’t accept distant, vague promises about “reviews” and “long-term visions” — we don’t want faraway pledges, we need concrete action starting tomorrow.

09/03/2026

ℹ️ Statement: No Shortage of Pillows or Pillowcases at Glan Clwyd Hospital

Stuart Keen, Director of Environment and Estates at Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board said: “We are aware of social media posts circulating over the weekend suggesting that Glan Clwyd Hospital is experiencing a shortage of pillows and pillowcases.

“We would like to reassure patients, families and the public that there are no operational issues with the supply of pillows or pillowcases at the hospital. Appropriate stock levels are maintained and patient care is not affected.

“While we appreciate the kindness and generosity shown by members of the public, we would kindly ask that people do not donate pillows, pillowcases or money in response to these posts.
“Our teams ensure that appropriate supplies are available through established procurement and infection prevention processes.”

09/03/2026

Does Wales need a “change of mindset” about A&E? Or do our leaders?

Every winter, health boards warn that A&Es are overwhelmed and urge people to “think hard” before attending – to try a pharmacist, GP, Minor Injury Unit or 111 instead. We’re told stories about people calling ambulances for earache or “turning up with their mates after a night out”. The clear message is that the public is the problem.

It isn’t. There have always been a few people who misuse services, but nobody spends 12 hours in a packed waiting room and two nights on a trolley in a corridor for fun. People are there because they need care and because every other door has been shut: MIUs closed or reduced to short hours, community beds sold off, GP surgeries overwhelmed. Once those local services are stripped back, A&E stops being a casual choice and becomes the last option left.

Across Wales, minor injury units have been quietly hollowed out. In North Wales, community MIUs have closed and others now open only in the daytime or early evening, leaving long stretches of coast and countryside without realistic local cover. In Powys, MIUs that once ran through the night in Brecon, Llandrindod and Welshpool now all shut at 8pm – there isn’t a single overnight MIU left in the county. In Carmarthenshire, Llanelli has lost its 24/7 MIU and Llandovery’s unit never returned after its “temporary” Covid closure, forcing rural communities to travel much further or rely on phone triage instead.

At the same time, GP capacity has been allowed to wither. There are fewer surgeries, fewer full‑time GPs and far more patients per doctor than a decade ago. The average practice now looks after significantly more people than it did ten years ago, Wales has roughly twice as many patients per full‑time GP as typical European benchmarks, and yet general practice still delivers well over eleven million appointments a year. “See your GP instead of A&E” often means joining a queue for a service that is already running beyond safe capacity.

Corridor care – patients lined along walls, treated in bays and cupboards – is not happening because hundreds of thousands of people suddenly forgot what A&E is for. It is happening because centralisation, poor workforce planning, closed community beds and downgraded local services have turned whole areas into healthcare deserts. Everyone is funnelled into A&E because nearby options have disappeared – and then they can’t get out again because step‑down and rehabilitation beds have also been closed. People wait on trolleys not because they chose the wrong door, but because there is nowhere else for them to go and nowhere for them to be discharged to.

So yes, a mindset needs to change – but it isn’t the public’s. It’s the mindset that treats cuts and closures as inevitable, buries them in endless consultations and “safety reviews”, and uses patient‑blaming as a convenient distraction. Enough is enough.

Bring back our beds. Open our community hospitals and MIUs. Treat frontline staff with dignity and respect. And stop telling patients they are the reason the system has collapsed.

If you’d like a template letter to send to your local representatives and election candidates – or help finding the right contact details for your area – drop a comment or message. Then please use it: turn up to “engagement” events and hustings, ask these questions on the record, and keep repeating one clear demand – fair access for all, and honest answers from those who run our NHS. Share this post if it reflects your experience, tag your reps and candidates, raise it in your community groups and unions. When we speak together, calmly and persistently, we are harder to ignore. Community is power.

07/03/2026

A Third Welsh County Declares a Health Emergency

This week, Powys joined the growing cry for help across Wales — becoming the third county to formally declare a Health Emergency.

In a full meeting of the council, Powys voted by a significant majority to sound the alarm over the devastating impact of healthcare centralisation. Their motion told a story that is fast becoming familiar in every part of our country: struggling hospitals, overstretched staff, and communities left behind.

The Powys motion called for:
1️⃣ Urgent intervention by Welsh Government to stabilise services and protect patient safety.
2️⃣ A halt to any further erosion of local healthcare — no more downgrades or quiet closures of community hospitals.
3️⃣ A clear, transparent plan between Powys Teaching Health Board and Welsh Government to restore safe, accessible, dignified healthcare for every resident.
4️⃣ Real investment in recruiting and retaining doctors, dentists, and nurses locally.
5️⃣ Fair treatment for Powys residents — no one should be treated as a second-class citizen when it comes to healthcare.
6️⃣ Commitment from all Senedd election candidates to boost investment in social care, speeding up hospital discharges and cutting waiting times.
7️⃣ And finally, a guarantee that within the next government term, the North Powys Wellbeing Hub in Newtown will be delivered in full.

This may be a different health board, but the pattern is painfully clear. In north and mid Wales, three county councils have now declared emergencies, all on the same grounds.

Major hospitals are overwhelmed. Waiting lists are endless. Corridor care has become the new normal. It all leads back to one policy: the managed erosion — or as Powys rightly called it, “erosure” — of our local hospitals and community services.

In Bronglais, Ysbyty Gwynedd, Wrexham Maelor, and the notoriously overrun Ysbyty Glan Clwyd, the results are visible every day. And for Powys residents without their own major hospital, the reality is even harsher — being sent across the border into England for routine appointments, often hundreds of miles from home, facing spiralling transport and accommodation costs just to access care that should be local and timely.

Further south, the picture is no brighter. Hundreds have marched to save Maesteg, and Mountain Ash now faces losing its specialist palliative care beds. To the west, Withybush continues to be stripped of services — one after another.

The message could not be clearer — from the frontline staff, from the patients, from councillors across three counties:

🩺 Centralisation is a failed policy.

It is destroying the infrastructure that keeps healthcare fair, local, and humane. It is putting impossible pressure on our staff and pushing vulnerable patients further from the care they need.

Wales deserves better. Our communities deserve better.

We demand action now — not distant promises, not future strategies, but tangible steps today.

🗣️ Treat our staff fairly. Treat the public honestly. Stop making big promises with one hand while stripping services with the other.

The people of Wales are watching, and we are standing together — for our hospitals, for our staff, and for the right to fair, local, dignified care.

04/03/2026

A&E is the flashing neon sign of systemic failure in our healthcare services. It has to be. It’s where the most urgent, life‑threatening and serious medical cases go and so too, the eyes of the press and the public. We can understand the dramatic, breathtaking horrors of an overflowing A&E corridor in a way that the quieter, more benign tragedies of a centralised healthcare system sometimes pass us by with no more than a forlorn whisper.

But there are two versions of this heartbreaking tale.

In one, glaring corridor lights; patients strewn across chairs and floors; staff racing between them and fighting off the nightmare. The other?

Far away, in a quieter corner, an elderly grandmother in her eighties is spending her fourth hour having her fragile bones shaken on a potholed road in a worn‑down bus with no suspension. She’s not a patient. She’s a visitor. Her daughter is recovering from a stroke in a hospital “an hour’s drive away” – except this mother can’t drive anymore, and it certainly isn’t an hour, and when she arrives, dropped with her walking stick at the side of the road, she will still have to walk up a steep hill to reach the hospital.

In a bustling train station in Birmingham, a ninety‑year‑old couple with impaired vision are trying to navigate a crowded train platform for one of their many changes on the way to a routine hospital appointment back in Wales. There is no direct train and the hospital is a two‑hour drive on a good day. In the confusion, the gentleman’s walking cane is kicked out from under him and his 92‑year‑old wife is left struggling to hold him up.

Somewhere further west, a desperate wife of over 40 years is battling to reach her husband for the very last time. The roads are slow. She won’t be there in time.

Meanwhile, in the refurbished, community‑funded ward that would have saved all these people’s heartache, fear and pain, there’s a wellbeing hub with guest speakers taking place.

This is the cost of centralisation.

Reopen the wards. Bring care back *closer* to the people who need it most – older people, disabled people, carers and low‑income families who simply cannot absorb the cost, distance and exhaustion any longer. Improve conditions for the staff who are holding this threadbare system together: restore safe bed capacity, invest in community and step‑down beds, and give frontline teams the time, tools and colleagues they need to care safely.

Stop chasing only the big‑ticket, far‑off promises while people are suffering on buses, in train stations and on endless roads right now. Start with the smaller, obvious fixes that make a life‑changing difference today: reopen local wards, protect community hospitals, sort out transport and visiting, and design services around real people’s lives, not theoretical models.

Put compassion back into our healthcare system – not in a strategic document, but in bricks, mortar and staffed beds in the communities where people live and love.

04/03/2026

Time for the harder truths.

This week, we were tagged in a post from someone who says they witnessed a woman die, unattended, in the corridor at Ysbyty Glan Clwyd’s A&E. As a campaign, we’ve held back from talking openly about the full realities of corridor care because we don’t want vulnerable or elderly people to be too frightened to seek help when they need it. But the more stories we hear, the clearer it is that people are already afraid of A&E in Betsi Cadwaladr – and increasingly across Wales.

The story of the woman who died in the corridor is not unique. Betsi Cadwaladr has some of the highest levels of preventable deaths in Wales, and too many of them are happening in A&E corridors. In 2024, a series of “Prevention of Future Deaths” reports highlighted unsafe delays, elderly patients waiting many hours for ambulances and then more hours outside hospitals, and dying patients left for too long to be triaged by junior staff without the experience or support to recognise how seriously unwell they were. These reports exist for one reason: to stop other people dying in the same way.

Coroners have warned that hospitals repeatedly operating at the highest escalation level is simply unsustainable for staff and patients. That was 2024. Nobody on the ground believes this has been “fixed”. When we started this campaign, we asked if anyone had experienced corridor care in North Wales. The question now should be: is there anyone who hasn’t either experienced it, or knows someone who has?

It’s dangerous.
It costs lives.
And it will continue as long as there aren’t enough senior clinicians in A&E to triage and escalate care safely; there are no beds for step‑down care so patients stay blocking acute beds and corridors; and there is not enough medical support in our communities to keep people well and out of hospital.

Now we’re seeing the financial cost too. Betsi Cadwaladr’s spending is so far out of control that its £82 million “improvement” funding allocation for future years is at risk if it cannot close its deficit. This isn’t overspending on luxuries – it is the price of failure: cancelled operations, blocked beds, out‑of‑area placements, agency bills, unsafe patient flow, and all the extra work created when a system kills rather than cares.

We are not interested in glossy promises about “transformation” in five or ten years’ time. We want real, practical changes now: reopen safe wards across BCUHB that could take patients today; give Tywyn the budget for the extra night nurse cover it needs; switch Abergele to a step‑down unit once Orthopaedics moves to Llandudno – the staff are already there, it just needs a green light; back the Rainbow Foundation’s plan to turn Penley’s beds into a reablement ward; and refurbish the mothballed ward in Denbigh and bring it back into use.

We don’t need magical unicorn solutions in some distant, post‑election future. We need the Welsh Government and Betsi Cadwaladr to show real intent to save lives today.

👉 Call to action:

If you or someone you love has experienced corridor care, please share your story with us (privately or in the comments).

Share this post so that decision‑makers cannot pretend they “didn’t know”.

Write to your MS, MP and local councillors and ask them what they are doing right now to reopen safe beds, staff our wards properly and end corridor care in North Wales.

Corridor care is not just a Betsi Cadwaladr problem – it is now being described as endemic across Wales, with Emergency Departments up and down the country caring for patients in corridors, on chairs and in spaces that were never meant for safe treatment. Doctors and nurses are clear: this is dangerous, degrading and dehumanising, driven by a lack of beds, delayed discharges and a complete breakdown in patient flow.

We are calling on the Welsh Government, health boards and local representatives to commit to a clear, time‑bound plan to end corridor care across Wales: open safe beds, fix discharge bottlenecks, invest in community and social care, and guarantee that no patient will be left waiting for hours in a corridor when they need a hospital bed.

Together, we can make it impossible for those in power to look away.

25/02/2026

Here are Carol Shillabeer, CEO of Betsi Cadwaladr, and Eluned Morgan, former Health Secretary and now First Minister, setting out a clear case for “reablement” beds – care close to home that prevents crisis and frees up acute hospitals. We agree; we’ve just been calling them “community” or “convalescent” beds.

If ministers are serious, they could start by restoring step‑down beds in Tywyn and Penley, re‑designating the soon‑to‑be vacant 24‑bed ward in Abergele, and refurbishing the mothballed ward in Denbigh. And if “care next door” really is the goal, it has to apply in West and Mid Wales too – where services at hospitals like Withybush and Bronglais are being stripped back, forcing patients into long, costly journeys on poor transport links for treatment, meaning these communities are missing out twice: once on local healthcare, and again on the infrastructure that would at least help them reach care further away.