Patients are dying in hospital corridors and going undiscovered for hours, while sick people are being left to soil themselves due to a lack of beds, according to a harrowing report into the state of the NHS.
Shocking testimony from nurses reveals patients being treated in bathrooms, cupboards, cloakrooms and even viewing rooms where families visit deceased relatives.
In some hospitals, female patients are miscarrying in corridors, while others say they cannot provide CPR quickly enough to patients having heart attacks.
The experiences of more than 5,000 nursing staff across the UK, with more than 4,000 from England, contained within the 460-page report highlight how patients are “routinely coming to harm” and deaths are happening, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said.
Patients are sitting for days in chairs – so-called “chair care” – due to a lack of beds, patients piling up in corridors, delays to treatment and the elderly unable to get help due to no call bells and not enough staff.
Adults are also being placed in paediatric recovery rooms, the poll found.
“Patients have died on trollies and chairs in the corridor and waiting room. All the fundamentals of care have broken down – we are no better than a developing world casualty,” one nurse reported.
A nurse in the south-east of England said: “A patient died in the corridor but wasn’t discovered for hours.”
Another said the situation in the NHS today is “worse than the pandemic”.
The report comes just days after a hospital in north London advertised for a corridor nurse, as the NHS grapples with a winter crisis of rising pressures.
Recent days have seen more than a dozen hospitals declaring critical incidents as a “quad-demic” of flu, Covid, norovirus, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) all put a strain on the health service’s resources.
Shocking testimonies from NHS nurses
- “Patients sometimes wait in [the] emergency department for over 35 hours to go to a ward, just to be put in the corridor. The system is broken.”
- “Department overwhelmed, which is a daily occurrence…At its worse asking someone to go round and make sure people are still alive.”
- “No bedside tables, patient unable to reach water and food. No bedside chairs, patients kept in bed at all times. No call bells, patient unable to call for help.”
- “Regularly have 25+ patients in a corridor with no privacy or dignity to be examined or have personal care. This inflicts horrendous moral injury in all staff who work in this environment.”
- “I worked throughout Covid-19 and although [it] was a horrendous experience, this lack of care in the broken system is worse.”
- “The last patient we had had to be changed for faeces in the store cupboard. Totally inappropriate, and truly awful for the patient.”
- “We have one cubicle space that is for corridor assessment and toileting – but is often busy, so delays in toileting resulting in people laying in their own urine/faeces.”
- “Patient died due to lack of safety equipment by bedside (oxygen, suction, etc). The patient choked, desaturated while reconfiguring bays.”
- “We have had cardiac arrests in the corridor or in cubicles blocked by patients on trolleys in front of them, delaying lifesaving CPR. Despite these ‘never events’, we still are obliged to deliver care in the corridor.”
- “A patient had a cardiac arrest in the corridor by the male toilet and died”. Another nurse described “cardiac arrests in the corridor with no crash bell, crash trolley, oxygen, defibrillator…straddling a patient doing CPR while everyone watches on”.
The Whittington Hospital asked for registered nurses who can work shifts in their corridors to offer care, when patients overflow from existing rooms.
The RCN called for immediate Government action to end “corridor care”, which it says has become normalised and is not just occurring in the winter months.
In a media briefing accompanying the report, one nurse, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “This is not nursing, this is firefighting.”
A survey of NHS nursing staff for the study found 67 per cent said they are delivering care every day in overcrowded or unsuitable places. More than nine in 10 said care is unsafe.
One nurse was emotional as she told the briefing there were 30 chairs in their emergency corridor but no extra staff for those patients. She said: “The risk of patients dying and not being noticed is very high, everybody is stretched.”
She also told how staff experienced violence from patients due to long waiting times, adding the experience of working in the NHS “makes a hole in your soul”.
‘Harrowing report is no surprise’
Professor Nicola Ranger, RCN chief executive, described the report as “harrowing” and said staff were leaving because they “cannot do it any more”.
She added: “This winter is absolutely no surprise to any of us. Wards, departments were escalated into areas they shouldn’t be all through June, July, August, September.
“It’s become normal to put patients in all sorts of areas that I can promise you, being a chief nurse for nearly 10 years before this job, prior to Covid, would have been seen as abhorrent and totally unacceptable.
“That’s the real tragedy here, is that care that would have been seen prior to Covid as shocking has been normalised.”
She said the NHS did not have enough beds or nurses to meet demand and that was occurring throughout the year, adding: “I really want to make sure that flu is not used as the excuse for this.”
Regarding “chair care”, Professor Ranger said: “We talk about ‘fit to sit’ as the new mantra. Sitting in a chair is not just about comfort…if that patient deteriorates, what every nurse needs to be able to do is to start CPR or resuscitate someone.
“You cannot do that sitting in a chair. So, you have to either get somebody onto a trolley… but sometimes the only flat surface is on the floor. So this isn’t just a care issue, it’s a safety issue.”
Pressure on Government to address ‘scale of problem’
Turning to the Government, she said there was a need for ministers to acknowledge the “scale of the problem”, adding all of this could have been predicted.
Of the Prime Minister’s drive to cut waiting lists, she said: “It’s very difficult to get on top of elective care if you don’t get on top of emergencies. They are two sides of the same coin.”
Asked whether the experience of this winter increases the chances of more industrial action in the near future, she said nursing has the largest number of vacancies, adding that “you cannot improve the care for patients unless you improve the care for nurses, simple as that.”
She added that “this country is in a crisis when it comes to nursing and industrial action is always a last resort”, but said nurses felt “enough is enough, and actually this has to get sorted”.
Siva Anandaciva, director of Policy, Partnerships and Events at The King’s Fund, said: “The NHS is facing a toxic cocktail of pressures this winter. Immediate issues such as long waiting lists and overcrowded hospitals have been made worse due to the poor weather and rising flu and respiratory conditions.
“And then there are a host of chronic long-term conditions including endemic staff shortages, deteriorating buildings and broken equipment such as slow scanners, broken lifts, and leaking roofs.
“Parts of the NHS are trying to run a 21st century health service from crumbling buildings which pre-date the NHS and are not fit for purpose… the poor physical state of the NHS is becoming a severe hindrance to health service productivity.”
The Health Secretary Wes Streeting said that he cannot promise “there won’t be patients treated in corridors next year”.
He told MPs on Wednesday: “I want to be clear, I will never accept or tolerate patients being treated in corridors. It is unsafe, undignified, a cruel consequence of 14 years of failure on the NHS and I am determined to consign it to the history books.”
Duncan Burton, chief nursing officer for England, said: “Increasing levels of demand have resulted in extreme pressures on services, particularly over recent months and one of the toughest winters the NHS has experienced.
“The impact this has on the experiences of patients and staff, as highlighted by the RCN report, should never be considered the standard to which the NHS aspires.”
He said building a health service that is fit for the future is a “key priority for the NHS and Government and the NHS is continuing to work hard to deliver improvements across urgent and emergency care for patients and our staff”.
