Why thousands of NHS patients are stuck in beds they no longer need

You want nothing more than to get back home, sleep in your own bed, and return to life with your friends and family. But you can’t leave. Perhaps you’re waiting for a wheelchair ramp to be installed at home, or a shower rail to reduce your risk of slipping and falling. So you remain in a hospital bed instead.

Now imagine in the corridor just outside your room, there is a patient who needs your bed. They’re much sicker, but because a bed isn’t available, they’re left receiving care in a place no patient should have to be treated.

This is the daily reality in hospitals up and down the country.

Over the past four years, an average of nearly 13,000 hospital beds in England have been occupied by patients who are medically fit to leave, accounting for a staggering 10% of all hospital beds. Meanwhile, new data shows that in May 2026, more than 2,000 patients experienced corridor care each day.

Most distressingly, behind each one of these numbers are people struggling to receive the care they deserve at their most vulnerable. Healthwatch England has published work describing the emotional toll on patients waiting in corridors: people often experience a mix of fear, anxiety and embarrassment. For patients waiting to be discharged, people feel unheard, stigmatised and excluded from decisions about their care.

And let’s not forget the impact this has on staff as well. The Royal College of Nursing describes how staff feel frustrated and demoralised by corridor care. It must be incredibly difficult to watch patients receive subpar treatment in unsuitable environments.

Then there’s the financial cost. Recent work by The King’s Fund estimates the cost to the NHS of delayed discharges has risen to £2.7 billion in 2025/26, up 7.5% in just one year. At a time when every pound is under pressure and budgets are being squeezed, a lot of funding is being used to care for patients in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So what needs to change?

Hospitals must continue to improve patient flow and increase emergency care capacity. But the long-term solution lies beyond hospital walls. If the government is serious about creating a health and care service fit for the future, it must deliver on its promise to shift care closer to home, and that means investing in community health services.

It must also finally grasp the nettle of adult social care reform and go much further to prevent ill health in the first place, including tackling issues such as childhood obesity.

None of these ideas are new or radical. What would be radical is a government that turns them into reality and matches its ambition with the investment and political courage to make a lasting change.

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Danielle Jefferies is a Senior Analyst at The King’s Fund.

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