The financial cost of delayed discharges has risen to £2.7bn in
2025/26, up 7.5% in just one-year, new King's Fund analysis has
found.
It comes as the NHS is expected to release the latest figures for
the number of people who experienced corridor care in the
month of June and the latest delayed discharge figures. In
May, the number of instances of corridor care was close to
70,000.
A delayed discharge is when a patient remains in a
hospital bed despite being clinically fit enough to leave. This
occurs for several reasons including stretched capacity in NHS
community services and the social care system for the patient to
be transferred into, and administrative bottlenecks such as
coordination with care transfer hubs.
Last year there were nearly 13,000 delayed discharges
daily, up 300 on the 2024/25 daily average. This means close to
one in 10 of all hospital beds at any given point in time are
being taken up by someone who was fit enough to be
discharged.
The latest NHS figures show that the cost of a bed day has now
hit £562. That is up from an estimated £536 last year and 10% on
2022/23's figure of £512. The result is that delayed discharges
are now costing the NHS £2.7 billion a year.
These delays cause frustrations for patients who are stuck in
hospital beds, unable to leave and get back to their friends and
family whilst knowing sicker patients need your bed. The impacts
also trickle down into the rest of the system with A&Es
becoming backed-up, unable to admit people into hospital and
leading to awful cases of corridor care, with almost 70,000
instances reported last month.
The physical, emotional and mental impact of both
issues cannot be overstated. Healthwatch describes
emotional toll on patients waiting corridors, as people often
experience a mix of fear, anxiety and embarrassment.
The Royal College of Emergency
Medicine has previously drawn a link between corridor
care and excess deaths. Recent work of theirs also found
that long A&E waits could
be responsible for 300 deaths a week last
year.
These issues also have an impact on staff. The Royal College of
Nursing describes how staff feel frustrated and
demoralised by corridor care. Delayed discharges can leave staff
feeling disillusioned about their roles as the pressure to discharge patients
can sometimes feel dehumanising.
The government has previously
pledged to end corridor care and part of the solution to
that will be reducing delayed discharges through steps included
in the Urgent and Emergency Care
plan for 2025/26. To meet this target the government must
also tackle reducing incoming demand for care, something
hospitals have less direct control over, by effectively
implementing the shift to community care, reforming social
care and being bolder on primary
prevention through action like tackling
obesity.
Danielle Jefferies, Senior Analyst at The King's Fund,
said:
The rising costs of delayed discharges will put even more
pressure on already stretched NHS budgets alongside contributing
to longer waits in A&E and more harrowing cases of corridor
care.
'Patients are being left stranded in hospital beds, frustrated at
being unable to leave despite being well enough to do so, knowing
that sicker patients need their bed with little they can do about
it.
A range of issues cause this backlog, including stretched adult
social care and NHS community services, to administrative
quagmires, all which trickles down into A&E waiting rooms and
the consequences are felt acutely by patients.
Solving these issues will of course be key to reaching the
government's goal of ending corridor care by 2029 and reducing
the financial and human burden of delayed discharge but it is not
just within hospitals and the care system that government should
be looking to for solutions.
Ultimately, these problems can only be addressed sustainably
by reducing incoming demand on hospitals. That means the
government must be much bolder in tackling wider issues like
obesity or moving care out of hospitals by effectively
implementing greater community care.'
ENDS
Notes to editors:
First reported by LBC: Hospitals spending £2.7bn
every year on patients fit enough to go home | LBC
The analysis by The King's Fund can be found here.
An instance of corridor care is defined by the
NHS as a patient spending at least 45 minutes in a
clinically inappropriate area of an emergency department or
general and acute ward.
Previous King's Fund work on delayed
discharges: Delayed Discharges: Why
It's Hard To Say How Many Are Due To Social Care Capacity | The
King's Fund.
