Rory Deighton
Acute Director, The NHS Confederation
While the weather has taken a turn for the better, the NHS is still feeling the impact of another tough winter where high levels of flu and norovirus piled pressure onto already stretched services.1
The NHS went into this winter facing record demand across GP surgeries and A&Es. This is fuelled by an ageing and increasingly unwell population, which often has more complex or multiple health conditions for clinicians to manage.
Corridor care has become normalised
Despite their best efforts, NHS staff have had to resort to caring for patients in corridors or overflow wards2 — practices that were unthinkable a decade ago. This has sadly become normalised following the combination of rising demand, years of underinvestment and a spike in winter viruses. Corridor care not only compromises patient privacy, dignity and safety but can also leave NHS staff subject to the moral injury of being unable to provide the care they would like to.
One of the key challenges is the lack of social and community care, which leads to delays in discharging medically fit patients out of hospital. This causes bottlenecks throughout the urgent and emergency care system, which can leave ambulances queuing outside hospitals and patients waiting hours to be transferred to wards from A&Es.
We must make sure that the
NHS does not face another
winter like the last few.
Preventing further tough winters
We must make sure that the NHS does not face another winter like the last few, which have been some of the worst in its history.3 Tackling corridor care will take a concerted effort across the health and social care systems so that patient flow in and out of hospitals can be improved. Work already underway includes setting up same-day emergency care services, urgent community response programmes and wraparound care innovations.
We look forward to working with the Government and NHS England on implementing the urgent and emergency care improvement plan. The NHS will not be able to improve urgent and emergency care performance until the challenges across social care are also addressed. The upcoming Casey Commission into social care is a welcome development, with wholesale reform the only means to achieve the improved adult social care system that the NHS — and the public — needs.
[1] NHS England. 2025. Over 40,000 bed days lost to norovirus last month.
[2] Royal College of Nursing. 2025. Corridor care: ‘Devastating testimony’ shows patients are coming to harm.
[3] NHS England. A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions 2024-25.
