Corridor care in NHS hospitals

Summary

• Corridor care is the treatment of patients in spaces not designed, staffed or equipped for care, such as corridors, waiting rooms and chairs on wards.
• It happens when the wards are full. A patient who needs admitting waits in A&E until a ward bed is free.
  • About 12,900 patients a day in England in 2025 were medically fit to leave hospital and still in a bed.
• The worry is safety and dignity. A patient in a corridor is harder to monitor and has no piped oxygen, and a private conversation is difficult there.
• Staff use corridors because the alternatives look worse. Doctors and nurses told the Health Services Safety Investigations Body, known as HSSIB, that it was the "best worse" option, compared with leaving people at home or in ambulances.
• Hospitals and nurses' leaders disagree about making corridors safer:
  • Some hospitals have fitted corridors with call bells and plug sockets and assigned staff to them.
  • The Royal College of Nursing says there is "no safe level of corridor care" and that those changes show an NHS resigned to a managed decline in standards.
• The government has set a target of ending corridor care by the end of this Parliament, meaning before the next general election.
• NHS England counted about 2,900 patients a day in May 2026 and about 3,300 in September, adding A&E and wards together. The September figure is provisional.

Dig deeper

• William Harvey Hospital is in Ashford, Kent. On 28 September 2026 the NHS trust that runs it, East Kent Hospitals, said its beds were full and declared a critical incident.
• A trust declares one when it can no longer be sure of providing safe services. East Kent asked people to come to A&E only if their life was at risk.
• The trust had declared another in February 2026, on the second day of an unannounced inspection by the Care Quality Commission, which inspects hospitals.
• On the first morning inspectors found 34 patients who had waited more than 12 hours, and six who had waited more than 72 hours.
• Dr Des Holden, the trust's acting chief executive, called the report an "accurate reflection" of the overcrowding. He said the trust now rarely cared for a patient in a corridor.
• The trust's emergency departments reported 60 patients in corridor care on 28 September.
• At Ipswich Hospital in Suffolk, inspectors who visited in September 2025 reported on 18 February 2026 that some patients had waited up to 20 hours to be treated or admitted.
• Paul Scott, chief executive of the Ipswich trust since August 2026, told the BBC on 12 October that corridor care was "unacceptable to me, unacceptable to my staff".
• NHS England defined corridor care on 4 March 2026 as at least 45 minutes in a clinically inappropriate area of an A&E or a ward, and called it unacceptable.
• On 11 April 2026 the government sent specialist teams to the trusts with the most corridor care and confirmed £215.5 million for 40 new or expanded urgent care sites.
• The Society for Acute Medicine, a doctors' group, warned in the same announcement that a loose definition risks "gamification", where a hospital improves its figures without improving care.
• The Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimates 15,860 extra deaths in England in 2025 were associated with long A&E waits. The estimate assumes one extra death for every 72 patients who wait 8 to 12 hours before admission.
• Patients told HSSIB they felt safe and well looked after. They also said that when staff were busy, nobody could take them to the toilet.

Ethical issues

Interview questions

• What do you know about corridor care in the NHS?
• What happened at William Harvey Hospital in September 2026?
• You are on placement in A&E. A doctor asks a patient on a corridor trolley about a sensitive symptom, with other patients a metre away. The patient goes quiet. What do you do?
• Is it better to treat a patient in a corridor or to leave them waiting in an ambulance, and what is the case for each?
• What are the arguments for and against fitting call bells and oxygen in hospital corridors?
• The trust asked people to stay away from A&E unless their life was at risk. What could go wrong with that message?
• Trusts report their own daily counts of corridor care to NHS England. How could publishing them help, and what could go wrong?