No child should be treated in a corridor, let alone die in one.

The tragic case of Finlay Roberts highlights that pressures in urgent and emergency care do not only affect the frail and elderly. Our members know that children make up around a quarter of emergency department attendances, with more people under the age of 25 attending than those over 75. Yet the wider narrative about the urgent and emergency care crisis rarely describes what this pathway looks like for children. Ultimately children are now experiencing unacceptable delays in care that would have been unheard of a decade ago.

The Association of Paediatric Emergency Medicine (APEM) is calling for a greater focus on children's emergency care, recognising that the pressures affecting urgent and emergency care cannot be understood through an adult lens alone.

New evidence from the UK-wide UNCORKED study [Read the UNCORKED study] confirms that corridor care is a reality for children too. In a secondary analysis of 96 emergency departments, 15.4% of admitted children experienced care in an escalation area at some point during their ED stay and of those who received escalation-area care, 50.8% were cared for in non-clinical spaces, such as corridors.

Finlay's case is a call to put children's care at the forefront of urgent and emergency care planning, not as an afterthought to adult care. We welcome the Secretary of State's statement that there will be standards for caring for children in ED but would remind her of the existing ‘Standards for Children and Young People in Emergency Care Settings’ which APEM helped to develop [Standards here]. What is needed now are the resources, measurement and accountability to ensure these consensus-based standards are consistently delivered. 

To enable this APEM are calling for transparent, child-specific data on corridor care; meaningful accountability for delivering existing paediatric standards; investment in appropriate clinical space, staffing and senior expertise; and strategic planning to ensure equitable access to safe, timely care for every child, regardless of where they live or when they need help.

Some interventions will take time but for this winter we must at least:

i) Report data on children’s pathways through Emergency Departments

ii) Ensure equity of access to ED alternatives for adults and children

iii) Benchmark key presentations to promote consistent high quality care, reducing unwarranted variation

There is no single solution that will work for every child or every service. Improving children's emergency care requires recognition of their distinct needs and a commitment to making their care just as important as improving care for adults.

Our thoughts remain with Finlay's family, we thank them for their courage in using their loss to help drive forward change.