Monday, 22 December 2025
The annual shutdown of parts of the NHS looms as routine services prepare to close or operate at reduced capacity over the festive season.
And the Royal College of Emergency Medicine warns this will place even more pressure on Emergency Departments (EDs) in England, and across the UK, exacerbating overcrowding and increasing corridor care in the weeks ahead.
From Christmas Eve afternoon, over Christmas Day (Thursday 25 December), followed by Boxing Day as a public holiday (Friday) and then heading into a weekend, large parts of the health and social care system – GPs, many inpatient services, parts of social and community care, and other support services – will either be closed, operating an ‘on call’ rota or running at reduced capacity. This happens again over the New Year break.
This leaves the parts of the NHS that remain open 24/7 expected to cope and function without the fully operating wider systems that are necessary to deliver effective care.
More significantly, with wider hospitals working slowly, and community and social care services with limited – if any – availability, patients are more likely to be in hospital longer. This means that beds run out and patients in Emergency Departments are left with nowhere to go. The result is that ED overcrowding and corridor care typically worsens in the period just after Christmas, and then again over New Year
This is one of the reasons that the NHS gets into difficulty every January, since it takes time to recover from the shutdown while winter illness are typically at their peak.
Dr Ian Higginson, President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said: “Over the festive season people still get sick, and yet we plan to operate primary care, hospitals, and social and community care, at a reduced capacity. It is difficult to understand why we accept this as normal, when there was so much concern about the effect of strikes, and when every year we know the NHS gets into trouble as it tries to pick up the pieces from this planned slowdown.
“While there is normally a massive push just before the festive season to get as many people home as possible from hospital who are well enough, it just doesn’t go far enough to make the impact needed in our departments. Those beds will be quickly snapped up by someone in an ED. Then our corridors fill up. We can only fit so many people in our departments. They are already filled with patients on trolleys in corridors, for many hours or even days.
“It takes most of the first month of the year to recover from this, but it happens every single year. For instance, last January delayed discharges surged to around 13,680 per day – up 21% from the daily average in the last part of December.
“The recent industrial action has distracted from the fact that large parts of the NHS and social care system more or less shut down for several days over Christmas – and this just stores up trouble for the weeks ahead. And yet we don’t hear the concerns we had about the strikes being expressed in the same way about this particular issue.
“RCEM has been advocating for more services to be widely available throughout the holiday season to keep the hospital system flowing as it should. We recommended that this be factored into NHS England’s winter plan, but it did not materialise.
“At the risk of sounding like Scrooge, it is so important that we sort this out in future years. While everyone needs time to rest and relax, it will be our patients and staff in Emergency Departments who pay the price for this come January.
“It is too late now, but we need to end the annual shutdown and make sure that more services are available 24/7 ahead of Christmas 2026/27. We must finally learn from the lesson that we repeatedly ignore each year.”
Additional information
Delayed discharges averaged around 12,430 per day in the lead up to Christmas 2024 (01 Dec – 19 Dec 2024). This dropped off to an average of around 11,300 per day for the remainder of the month, as hospitals worked to ensure as many patients as possible can be home in time for the festive period. Delayed discharges then surged to around 13,680 per day in the first week of January 2025.