NHS England has formally defined the blight on emergency departments and committed to publishing data on the issue from May.
A letter from NHS England, which includes a new definition of corridor care and a duty on trusts in England to begin collecting data on incidences of corridor care, will be published in May.
“We all know that corridor care is unacceptable; it creates an exceptionally poor experience for patients – particularly older patients – and their loved ones, generates low morale for our staff, and undermines the public’s confidence in the ability of the NHS to provide safe care when they need it most,” wrote Sarah-Jane Marsh, national priority programme director of urgent and emergency care at NHS England.
At the beginning of March, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) updated its guidance for corridor care, the blight on emergency departments that is getting worse rather than getting better.
In summary, NHS England writes that a patient has experienced corridor care if they have spent at least 45 minutes in a clinically inappropriate area of an emergency department or general and acute ward.
Ambulance handover delays should continue to be reported separately and monitored alongside corridor care to ensure efforts to reduce corridor care do not lead to longer waits in ambulances outside the hospital.
The 45-minute threshold for corridor care, Marsh writes, aligns with the W45 protocol for ambulances, and the aim is to revise both down to 30 minutes next year.
Data on corridor care will also be collected, and NHS England is committed to publishing it each month from May on NHS England’s website.
A largely symbolic move
The move has been welcomed as a small step towards solving the issue, though the Colleges remain cautious about whether the problem will be solved.
“Corridor care is the reality faced by doctors working in hospitals and patients being admitted via emergency departments across the country every single day,” said BMA consultants committee emergency medicine chair Den Langhor.
“The largely symbolic move from NHS England to agree a definition of corridor care represents a minor step forward in recognising the issue,” he added, though conceded that forcing hospitals to collect and publish data on corridor care is welcome, and will enable a more accurate picture of just how serious the problem has become nationwide to be built up.
Royal College of Nursing general secretary and chief executive Nicola Ranger called the new definition of corridor care “by no means perfect” and added that it had taken far too long to develop.
“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,” she said.
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine was similarly cautious. “We absolutely welcome NHS England’s commitment to focus on this issue. We also welcome the intention behind today’s definition of corridor care. This has been promised since early last year,” said the College’s president Ian Higginson.
“However, we can already measure long waits and overcrowding. It remains to be seen whether trying to measure corridor care on top of this will prove more effective.
