As winter closes in, NHS England has published a fresh set of measures designed to blunt the traditional January surge in urgent care demand. The package brings together expanded same-day emergency care, virtual wards, rapid response teams, increased 111 and 999 call handling, additional temporary bed capacity and stronger system-level coordination tools, all designed to keep patients away from crowded A&E corridors and ensure ambulances can keep moving.
Strengthening Urgent Care Capacity Amid Persistent System Pressures
The plan centres on delivering quicker, more localised care. Expanding Same Day Emergency Care (SDEC) aims to provide hospital-level assessment and treatment without requiring admission. Virtual wards and rapid response teams focus on enabling earlier discharge and preventing avoidable admissions. New “healthcare traffic control centres” will coordinate capacity across hospitals, community services and ambulance networks to keep the system moving. The government has also backed the approach with targeted funding and national procurement to boost ambulance and urgent care capability.
NHS operational guidance for 2025/26 sets out clear expectations for improving A&E and ambulance performance, using targets such as seeing at least 78 per cent of patients within four hours by March 2026 as a benchmark for judging winter readiness. Local Integrated Care Systems are already stress-testing their winter plans to assess whether the additional capacity and revised pathways can withstand peak seasonal pressures.
However, the measures are not a silver bullet. Many trusts continue to struggle with workforce gaps and ageing facilities, and temporary beds or surge staffing can only ease pressure when discharge routes reliably free space upstream. Most importantly, shortages in social care and supported housing still prevent clinically ready patients from leaving hospital, a constraint that expanded SDEC or virtual wards cannot resolve on their own.
Sustaining Reform Requires Investment, Integration and Realistic Expectations
Frontline clinicians and professional bodies have welcomed the focus on flow and community alternatives but warned against over-optimism. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine stresses that reforms must be fully funded, particularly for staffing and diagnostics, and warns that Urgent Treatment Centres (UTCs) and SDEC will succeed only when they are embedded in hospital flow and supported by sufficient clinical cover.
NHS England’s winter package takes a practical, system-wide approach to a familiar challenge, prioritising smoother flow, earlier intervention and stronger coordination instead of trying to force additional demand through A&E. Effective staffing, reliable IT integration and sufficient social care capacity will determine whether this winter runs smoothly or descends into another cycle of corridor queues and delays. If these elements are in place by January, the system may withstand the peak; if not, the NHS will face yet another season in which demand overwhelms capacity.
