Mildmay, PMQs, and the NHS crisis that needs our help
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
On Wednesday, 10 June 2026, our MP Rushanara Ali stood up in the House of Commons at Prime Minister's Questions and told Sir Keir Starmer that Mildmay Hospital - the place where Diana, Princess of Wales, made seventeen visits to break the stigma around HIV and AIDS - is at risk of closure because of NHS commissioning issues.
Ahead of the 30th anniversary of Diana's death next year, she asked the Prime Minister to lend his support to ensure this "iconic hospital" can survive and thrive. Sir Keir replied that Mildmay is "synonymous with extraordinary care and compassion," and committed to a meeting between Rushanara Ali and the Health Minister to discuss the concerns she had raised.
We are grateful to Rushanara Ali for putting this so directly to the Prime Minister, and to the Prime Minister for his response. We want to explain what's behind it, and why it matters.
At the same time, NHS England published data on corridor care for the first time. The figures showed that in May 2026, nearly 3,000 patients a day were receiving treatment in clinically inappropriate settings: corridors, side rooms, spaces without beds, converted waiting areas. On average, 2,241 patients a day experienced corridor care in emergency departments; a further 669 were treated in unsuitable spaces elsewhere in hospitals. This is not a new crisis. It is a documented, worsening, systemic failure. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has estimated that long A&E waits are now linked to more than 300 deaths per week in England, a tenfold increase in a decade.
The same NHS England release also showed the overall hospital waiting list rising for the first time in six months, to 7.22 million in May, up from 7.11 million in March. Almost 100,000 people had been waiting more than a year to begin routine treatment. These figures are connected. A system that cannot move patients efficiently from acute wards into appropriate step-down care blocks beds upstream, slows admissions, and lengthens the queue. Corridor care and waiting lists are symptoms of the same dysfunction.
The causes are well understood. The UK has 2.4 hospital beds per 1,000 people, against an OECD EU average of 5 and Germany's 7.8. When patients who are ready to leave acute wards cannot be discharged because there is nowhere suitable for them to go, those beds remain blocked, the next patient cannot come in from A&E, and the queue lengthens all the way back to the ambulance waiting outside. Corridor care is the visible symptom of a system with nowhere to put people.
This is precisely where Mildmay operates. We provide specialist step-down and rehabilitation care for patients who no longer need acute treatment but are not yet ready for discharge into the community. Our patients include people with complex HIV-related conditions and neurological disorders, people experiencing homelessness recuperating from illness or injury, and people in the early stages of post-detoxification recovery. These are patients for whom mainstream step-down settings are often clinically unsuitable.
And yet, week after week, we have beds available that are not being filled.
We publish our bed occupancy figures weekly. In May 2026, we had an average of 9.25 beds available each week across our 28-bed hospital. In June so far, the figure is 8.5. These are not beds that are empty because there is no demand for what we provide. They are empty because the NHS commissioning arrangements that should be directing patients to us are not functioning effectively. For a small independent charitable hospital that depends on NHS contract income for approximately 90% of its running costs, sustained under-referral is, in Rushanara Ali's words, a risk to our survival.
The British Geriatrics Society, responding to the corridor care data published on 11 June, said that ending corridor care will require a whole-system approach, including investment in community services, rehabilitation, social care and specialist services. That is a precise description of what Mildmay provides. We are part of the solution. But we can only function as part of the solution if patients are referred to us.
Ali, the MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, raised with the Prime Minister the structural commissioning challenges that put Mildmay at risk. The commitment to a ministerial meeting is an opportunity to make that case at the level where it needs to be heard. We hope it leads to a wider conversation about how London commissions specialist rehabilitation and step-down care and to concrete change: a commissioning system that directs patients to the capacity that exists, so that specialist beds are filled, and hospital corridors are not.
Next year marks thirty years since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, who visited Mildmay seventeen times and helped change how the world saw HIV and AIDS. We want Mildmay to enter that anniversary as a hospital that is not just remembered for its history, but secure in its future, continuing the work she supported.
References:
