A colleague recently drew my attention to new National Health Service (NHS) data which showed that, in May 2026, nearly 3,000 patients a day in England were being cared for in corridors or other inappropriate spaces.
The implied question was simple. If this can happen in England, why make such a big issue of “No Bed Syndrome” in Ghana? My humble view is that England’s corridor-care crisis is not an excuse for Ghana to lower its expectations. That is the reason for this postscript reflection.
The question is a fair one, and it deserves a calm answer. The answer cannot be that Ghana should be reassured by England’s distress. Another system’s difficulty does not make our own patients safer. It does not make denial of care acceptable. It does not make overcrowded emergency departments less dangerous. England’s crisis should not reduce our concern. It should sharpen it.
The “No Bed Syndrome” series of articles began with a Ghanaian reality, not with a foreign comparison. It began with the distressing knowledge that emergency patients in our own country can move from one hospital to another without finding timely care. It began with the recognition that a person may reach the doorway of the health system and still not enter safety. It began with the distressing reality that “No Bed Syndrome” is not simply about furniture. It is about access, movement, responsibility, capacity and trust.
The death of Mr. Charles Amissah conveyed that truth into national attention with unusual force. Painful as it is to say, tragedy sometimes forces a country to confront questions it has postponed for too long. In saying so, the point is not to exploit a family’s grief.
The point is to honour it by learning honestly from what happened. It matters that the ministerial committee set up to investigate this tragic incident found that care was denied. If care is denied, it cannot be ignored. Patients and families deserve truth, explanation and redress.
But accountability must be handled carefully. It must not stop with the most visible frontline worker. If staff are sanctioned while the broken system remains untouched, the country risks mistaking punishment for reform. While clear failures of duty should not be excused, we must also ask what made denial, delay, confusion or unsafe transfer more likely.
The harder questions must therefore still be asked. What capacity existed when the patient first needed care? When did frontline staff realise that emergency beds were exhausted? Who declared that there was “no bed,” and who had authority to override that declaration?
When did hospital leadership become aware that emergency capacity had been exceeded? Was this crisis sudden, or had it been building over hours or days? What escalation protocol was activated? What communication existed between rescuing EMTs, ambulance crew and receiving facilities? What concrete changes have been made since the incident?
A fair system must hold individuals accountable for clear failures of duty. But it must also hold institutions accountable for the conditions that make failure more likely. Otherwise, the lesson learnt by staff may not be “we must improve the system.” It may be “when the system fails, the frontline will be left to carry the blame.”
This is why recent events at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital also deserve sober reflection. Public reports indicated that, last month, hospital management temporarily halted fresh emergency admissions because of severe congestion, after which the Chief Executive Officer was suspended and health workers protested.
Whatever one’s view of that decision, the episode reveals a serious gap. A hospital under extreme pressure cannot be left to improvise alone, and a national directive not to turn emergency patients away cannot stand on goodwill, improvisation or individual initiative alone.
It must be backed by documented escalation rules, transfer protocols, real-time communication, ambulance coordination, hospital readiness and clear authority to act before the hospital’s emergency department becomes unsafe.
This is the Ghanaian background against which England’s corridor-care data should be scrutinised. There should be no schadenfreude in this comparison. Patients waiting in corridors in England are suffering just as patients waiting without beds in Ghana suffer. Another system’s distress should not become our reassurance. It should become our warning.
In Ghana, it is said that when you see your neighbour’s beard on fire, that is the time to make sure there is water in your own pot. The proverb does not invite us to gloat over our neighbour’s misfortune. It warns us against complacency. Bob Cole’s comic song “Edwen dɛ ɛre yɛ me” carries a similar lesson.
In the story, warnings are dismissed until the cost spreads to those who thought the danger belonged to someone else. That is how system failure often works. The burden is carried by patients, families and frontline staff who did not create the problem.
The English data therefore strengthens the argument made in the “No Bed Syndrome” series rather than weakening it. It shows that when hospital flow fails, even a highly resourced health system can end up providing care in corridors, converted rooms, waiting areas and other spaces never designed for prolonged clinical care. The lesson is not that corridor care is acceptable because it happens in England. The lesson is that corridor care is a warning sign of system failure wherever it occurs.
There is an important difference between occurrence and acceptance. The NHS figures have attracted concern precisely because corridor care is being treated as unsafe, undignified and unacceptable. The data is being defined, collected, published, discussed, challenged and used to demand action. A serious health system does not pretend that unsafe crowding is normal merely because pressure exists. It measures the problem, names the problem and tries to reduce the problem.
The comparison between Ghana’s “No Bed Syndrome” and England’s recent plight must therefore be made carefully. England’s difficulties are real, but England operates with far greater health expenditure, higher staffing density, broader diagnostic coverage, more developed ambulance systems, stronger digital data, more formal incident reporting, and more mature national performance systems.
These advantages do not prevent failure, as the recent corridor-care figures show. But they do provide buffers. They help detect deterioration, escalate problems, audit incidents, mobilise support and make the problem visible.
Ghana has fewer buffers. However, the lack of bufffers should not paralyse us into inaction. It just means there is less room for complacency. When an emergency department in Ghana becomes congested or overcrowded, the danger may occur alongside gaps in staffing, oxygen, monitoring equipment, medicines, laboratory turnaround, blood availability, imaging access, transport, specialist review and critical care beds.
To put it bluntly, if a patient in a corridor in a high-resource setting is already at risk, how much greater is the risk for a patient in a corridor, chair, ambulance, waiting room or hospital entrance in a lower-resource setting where the buffer or safety net is thinner?
This is where the phrase “No Bed Syndrome”, taken literally, can mislead. Beds matter, but beds alone do not create care. A hospital bed without nurses, oxygen, monitoring, medicines, diagnostics, doctors, blood, power, infection prevention and clinical accountability is not a safe clinical space.
Conversely, an emergency department can become unsafe even when beds exist somewhere in the hospital, if admitted patients cannot move into them, if discharge is delayed, if specialist decisions are not made, or if no one owns daily patient flow.
Unfortunately, the emergency department is often treated as the default holding place when the rest of the hospital cannot move patients onward. But when the emergency department itself is overwhelmed, even that precarious refuge can fail. Patients may then be left waiting in unsafe spaces, diverted from one hospital to another, or turned away from care they urgently need.
Severe overcrowding creates an operational fog in which unsafe shortcuts, weak supervision and poor practice can hide. It also places frontline staff in danger, exposing them to anger, blame, violence, exhaustion and moral injury when they are left to face families without the capacity, authority or support to provide safe care.
The heart of the matter is that being near a hospital is not the same as being safely cared for. Sitting in an emergency department is not the same as receiving emergency care. Being moved from one facility to another is not the same as reaching definitive care. Being told “there is no bed” may sound like an administrative explanation, but for the patient and family it may mean delay, abandonment or death.
An overcrowded emergency department is not merely an emergency department problem. It is an indictment of the wider hospital’s ability to move patients safely through its own system. A breathless patient waiting in a chair, a stroke patient waiting for imaging, a frail older person with a broken hip left lying on the emergency department floor, and a young injured person moved from hospital to hospital are not experiencing a technical shortage of furniture. They are experiencing the failure of access, movement, responsibility and safe response.
England’s corridor-care crisis therefore returns us to the central point. No health system is immune when flow, capacity, staffing, diagnostics, discharge and accountability fail to work together. Ghana has fewer reserves, so Ghana must be more deliberate in tackling the recurring problem of “No Bed Syndrome”. The warning has been given, by tragedy at home and by corridor care abroad. The next task is to turn that warning into action.
By Dr. George Oduro, FRCS, FRCEM (UK), FGCS
Consultant in Emergency Medicine
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