RCN welcomes progress towards tackling corridor care, but urges more investment

Following nurse-led action, NHS England (NHSE) has published plans to start tackling corridor care in acute trusts.

An RCN-led corridor care coalition has been calling for greater transparency and mandatory reporting of data for more than a year.

Action announced today includes an official NHSE definition of corridor care to enable accurate and consistent reporting. NHSE has also confirmed that the 30 NHS trusts worst affected by this unsafe practice are now rapidly developing their own commitments to make progress on corridor care over the coming months, reflecting suggestions put forward by the coalition.

In January 2026, the Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB) – the patient safety investigation body for England – found despite the clear risk to patients' safety, dignity and privacy, there was no agreed definition of corridor care in the NHS. There wasn’t any standardised data collection or public reporting to help ministers and service leaders understand the scale of harm.

NHSE has agreed with the coalition that consistent transparency about corridor care is key. To support this, it has published its new definition of corridor care – which states a patient has experienced corridor care if they’ve spent at least 45 minutes in a clinically inappropriate area of an emergency department or general and acute ward.

They’ve also committed to collecting the data starting in March 2026 and publishing it monthly from May onwards with trusts required to submit the new measures through daily situation reports.

The publication of a single definition is a step towards providing consistency, and we welcome the move to introduce the meaningful capture of data and reporting – something we've repeatedly called for. However, there are concerns about the inclusion of a 45-minute threshold, which risks underreporting the true scale of the problem.

Professor Nicola Ranger, RCN General Secretary and Chief Executive, said: “The brave testimony of nursing staff and determined campaigning of the RCN-led coalition has resulted in these commitments today. The new definition of corridor care, while by no means perfect and which has taken far too long to develop, will move us closer to determining the scale of this crisis.

“We’re pleased that NHS England has engaged and agreed to some of the actions put forward by the corridor care coalition. Together we need to start resetting the standards in our hospitals. These actions rightly place new expectations on trust leaders to own the corridor care crisis, put in place measures within their control to ease pressure, and recognise it as a risk to patients and staff by formally recording and reporting corridor care.”

Proposals put forward by the coalition also saw NHSE commit to trust boards taking formal ownership of corridor care as an organisational risk, ensuring any proposed use of corridor spaces is approved at executive level, and mandating that all cases meeting the definition are recorded as incidents.

As part of its discussions with NHSE and trust leaders, the coalition also demanded new government funding to expand capacity, address social care bottlenecks and improve discharge processes.

Nicola continued: “Today marks progress, but truly eradicating corridor care requires bigger and bolder long-term action, with the detail and new funding to match.

“As we’ve made clear, the solutions include investment to expand capacity across the system and particularly in community services and nursing roles, as well as improving discharge processes and removing red tape that prevents the effective use of social care capacity. That’s how you keep people healthy, ease pressures on hospitals and prevent this unconscionable practice taking place in our NHS.”