An internal online meeting of NHS leaders in Sussex on 4 November heard a stark warning: end‑of‑life patients are occupying beds and even A&E corridors in numbers that could throttle winter treatment. The BBC says it has listened to the recording; the comments came from a palliative care consultant at University Hospitals Sussex. It’s a South Coast story with consequences readers across the North will recognise.

She set out the dilemmas facing managers when palliative care collides with capacity: admit someone to a corridor or turn an ambulance around and risk a death on the way home. Neither choice sits comfortably in a service that promises dignity at the end of life.

With local hospices struggling to find places and home support often unclear, transfers out of hospital are slowing. The consultant told colleagues that teams have stopped listing straightforward dying patients for hospice transfer, reserving scarce capacity for those with complex needs.

Her fear was blunt: people with treatable conditions could be blocked from admission because beds are tied up by patients who should be supported elsewhere in the system.

University Hospitals Sussex runs Royal Sussex County in Brighton, Worthing, St Richard’s in Chichester and Princess Royal in Haywards Heath. Leaders from East Sussex Healthcare-covering Conquest in Hastings and Eastbourne District General-joined the call alongside community teams.

In response, NHS Sussex said it is committed to high‑quality, person‑centred palliative and end‑of‑life care, providing it in community settings and hospices where possible rather than on hospital wards. The system acknowledged significant pressure on emergency care but said staff are working to get people to the right service, supported by joint winter plans.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine calls delayed discharge one of the biggest drags on flow, warning that limited social and community care strands patients on wards. Its president, Dr Ian Higginson, said patients who would prefer to be at home too often end up in corridors that are ‘not the right places for anyone’.

An NHS clinician who spoke to the BBC said this pattern has been building: end‑of‑life care in emergency departments, corridors and ambulances, and discharges home without support. The recurring result, they said, is hospital beds taken up by dying patients while hospice or community care arrives late or not at all.

NHS Confederation argues that hospitals become the default when community and social care are thin, and that investment has to reach the whole system rather than asking hospitals to absorb more. Hospice UK adds that funding pressures have already reduced some community provision, pushing more people at the end of life onto busy wards.

For the North, the message is familiar. Discharge delays, fragile home‑care capacity and squeezed hospice funding are the pinch‑points we live with every winter. What Sussex is describing today is the same pressure our readers see from Teesside to Trafford: if the back door is jammed, the front door clogs.

The next few weeks will test whether integrated care boards can shore up community capacity, whether hospices can secure sustainable funding, and whether councils can hold adult social care steady through January. That, more than any single hospital initiative, will decide whether patients spend their final days where they want to be.