The totally unacceptable practice of lining the corridors and packing the waiting rooms of crowded British emergency departments with patients on chairs and trollies for inordinately long periods of time, throughout the year, has gained a spurious legitimacy through being dignified with the name of ‘corridor care.’ Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, has rightly taken it upon himself to tackle the problem, which has become normalised, although a matter of shame for the NHS, and pledged to end the practice by the end of the current Parliament. Around a million emergency departments, in eight out of ten NHS Trusts, were “cared for” in non-designated spaces in 2025. Meanwhile, NHS England has seen it fit to publish guidance on ‘Principles for providing patient care in corridors’ as recently as 11 December 2025, recommending “person-centred” care, despite the challenging circumstances, and providing a list of patient groups for whom corridor care is considered “never acceptable.” The guidance is somewhat and heavy on jargon and packed with reactive fire-fighting measures to deal with a situation that has spiralled out of control.
Dealing with a problem in the public sector must, of necessity, start with a standardised definition. In March 2026, NHS England accordingly defined corridor care in terms of ‘Patients spending 45 minutes or more in clinically inappropriate areas of emergency departments or wards, such as hallways or waiting rooms.’ Armed with this definition, NHS Trusts have started collecting data to allow formal monitoring and quantification of the problem. Reporting of their findings will begin in May 2026. It is surprising that even more data is to be collected when one would expect that enough is already known to be able to act upon. As is usual in a centralised and top-heavy NHS, specialist teams of “experts” from the appropriately-named Getting it Right First Time (GIRFT) programme will, somewhat belatedly, be dispatched to underperforming Trusts to improve the flow of patients through their emergency departments. Designed to tackle variations in service delivery within the NSH, GIRFT teams will devise “bespoke” plans in the hope of setting matters right. In addition, forty new or expanded urgent care sites will be funded to the tune of £215.5 million to manage demand and ease the burden on emergency departments. There is, however, a concern that once corridor care is measured on Electronic Patient Record systems and numerical targets introduced, the process of improving throughput risks being ‘gamed’ to make matters look better than they are. Furthermore, the marginal benefits of the fine-weaking of existing systems that are already operating at near-maximum efficiency are likely to be minimal at best.
Many of the measures being advocated for the purpose of eradicating corridor care are by no means new, and are periodically resurrected as if they had only just been invented. Rapid assessment by senior decision-makers at triage points or during handovers from ambulance staff are meant to expedite investigation and treatment in the emergency department. Same-day emergency care is also accepted good practice. The problem is that the onus is being placed unduly on frontline staff, whereas many unduly long stays in emergency department are caused by deficiencies within the hospital or with access to social care in the community. While staffing numbers and skill-mix within emergency departments have to be addressed as an when required, the net needs to be cast wider. Delays in assessment by specialists who control hospital beds; delays in specialised imaging; a shortage of beds on wards or in intensive care facilities resulting from serial closures or downsizings of acute hospitals (lack of capacity); difficulties in accessing social care facilities or other community services for the elderly and disabled; and a lack of alternative facilities for certain specific problems mean that corridor care is often the end-result of an exit block from the emergency department for patients whose initial medical assessment and treatment has been expedited in admirable fashion.
Corridor care, if anything, is an oxymoron, as an adequate standard of clinical care cannot, by definition, be provided in an area not specifically designated for that purpose. At best, it can be considered an overt manifestation of system-wide failure, the recognition of which should allow resources to be deployed more effectively towards dealing with the underlying causes of the problem. Caring for people in corridors and waiting rooms is an invasion of their privacy and rather undignified. It is highly unsafe as diagnoses can be delayed, essential medications can be withheld, life-saving treatments can be denied, infection control measures can be compromised, and patients can even be altogether overlooked in the frenzy of caring for numbers that overwhelm the capacity of emergency departments. Corridor care is also demoralising for nurses, doctors, and other healthcare providers, frequently leading to burnout, sickness-related absenteeism, and other adverse outcomes for themselves as well as for the wider NHS.
While the Health Secretary must be commended for his zeal in addressing corridor care, it is important to emphasise that it isn’t just the front door that needs attention, but also what lies beyond. Besides none of the underlying reasons for corridor care are new, but have been festering for decades while the NHS continues to reorganise and redefine its purpose. Here’s hoping for the best!!
Ashis Banerjee