The label “corridor care” is hiding the true scale of the NHS hospital crisis, warns a senior doctor in The BMJ today.
Corridor care refers to the practice of providing care to patients in hospital corridors, waiting areas, or other spaces that are not designed or staffed for clinical care.
Consultant cardiologist Asif Qasim argues that the term has become “a convenient label that masks the normalisation of prolonged emergency department waits and profound deterioration in NHS patient safety.”
He notes that in September 2026, only 74% of the 2.4 million emergency patients in England were admitted, transferred, or discharged within four hours, and over 50,000 waited more than 12 hours from the decision to admit to admission. Across 2025-26, there were 570,957 of these waits, up 7.2% on the previous year.
Yet between 2010 and 2015, he points out that most London emergency departments met or approached the 95% four-hour target, with 12-hour waits treated as exceptional events requiring root cause analysis, not an inevitable feature of hospital care.
Corridor care is the consequence of hospitals operating beyond their capacity, he writes. Moving patients into corridors or elsewhere in the hospital may temporarily ease pressures in the emergency department, but it does not create additional staffed beds, clinical capacity, or safer care.
The pressures in emergency medicine reflect wider systemic challenges and backlogs, he adds, much of which is driven by what happens beyond hospital walls, for instance, not being able to discharge frail older people safely because social care support is not available.
There is also substantial evidence associating prolonged emergency waits with increased mortality. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has estimated that 15,860 excess deaths were associated with prolonged emergency department waits in England during 2025, compared with 1,657 in 2015.
Qasim calls for “a more honest national conversation informed by published data” including reporting the number of patients spending long periods in unsuitable spaces, investing in acute capacity alongside social care, and reviewing serious incidents involving prolonged waits to help improve systems rather than assign blame.
“Most importantly, we owe candour to patients and their families,” he writes. “A patient waiting 12 to 24 hours for a hospital bed should not be led to believe that this represents normal, safe care simply because it has become commonplace. Nor should staff be expected to reassure patients about conditions they know fall below acceptable clinical standards.”
He concludes: “We should ask not only how we reached this position, but why we have become willing to accept it. When services are overwhelmed every day, and winter pressures are all year round, the pressures on staff are relentless. The first step towards restoring safe hospital care is to stop normalising its failure.”
