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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.
Senior cardiologist Asif Qasim argues that the term has become "a convenient label that masks the normalization 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 more than 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% from 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, many of which are driven by what happens beyond hospital walls—for instance, not being able to discharge frail older people safely because support from social services is not available.
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