A mural for the NHS (Picture: Rossographer)
Patients are dying in the corridors of over-full hospitals in Britain. Sick people with dementia and incontinence are being washed in public spaces, next to vending machines. And women are receiving care following pregnancy miscarriage in areas of hospitals that are not private.
Those are some of the shocking testimonies in a report by the RCN health workers’ union published this week.
One nurse said, “There is no dignity to being nursed in a public corridor. There is no emergency buzzer or oxygen for deteriorating patients.
“Our patients are housed outside our resus doors so these patients are having acutely unwell patients wheeled past them, sometimes unwell children or patients in cardiac arrest which is extremely distressing.”
Another reported, “I had to change an incontinent, frail patient with dementia on the corridor, by the vending machine.
“It was undignifying, felt so bad at the same time it was my duty to deliver care.
“(The) patient was largely exposed to passers-by and very distressed. There was no oxygen, suction or calling bell, it felt very bad and unsafe.”
And this type of “care” is being normalised to the extent that hospitals are now advertising for staff specifically to work on corridors.
One nurse told of the great dangers in the situation.
“Utilising corridors on a daily basis now with patients staying up to 24 hours in these locations,” they said.
“Also seeing patient in the back of ambulances due to a lack of flow through the system.
“Patients constantly receive poor dignity” and “are frustrated”.
“In some cases,” patients “refuse treatment and self-discharge against advice due to the situation placing them at risk of a significant adverse event that would likely not have happened had the system been functioning as intended.”
Another added, “Patient on a trolley, not in a proper bed, area cold and draughty due to access from outside to the area. Patient had no sleep as was there all night.
“Stressful, soul destroying, upsetting. Seems to be mostly elderly, frail people in the corridor. ‘Privacy and dignity is everything’ seems to have gone out of the window.”
The 460-page report features testimony from some of the more than 5,400 nurses surveyed from between December 2024 and January this year.
The union had to grant its members anonymity because so many fear that speaking out will get them in trouble with their managers and hospital trust bosses.
Many respondents said that the failure to provide proper care caused them “heart-breaking” distress. For some, the moral injury was so great that they decided to leave emergency medicine, or even the NHS altogether.
The report ought to be a watershed moment for the Labour government.
But health secretary Wes Streeting’s NHS “reforms” will anything but address the crisis of capacity in our hospitals.
Streeting talks repeatedly of technology and artificial intelligence coming to the rescue of the health service.
His emphasis on “innovation” is a smokescreen for Labour’s failure to increase the number of nurses and the amount of space in our hospitals.
What the NHS needs urgently is not “reforms” but more clinical staff, new equipment—and more hospital beds.
Nurses in the report point out repeatedly that it is overwhelmingly older and more vulnerable patients that experience long periods of corridor care.
In opposition, Labour talked of starting a National Care Service that would help take pressure off hospitals by treating those patients in dedicated settings or at home.
They have since kicked all such talk into the long grass.
Instead, Labour has created an independent commission into social care that is not expected to release its final report until 2028.
That’s way too late to make a difference for the millions of older people suffering poor care in the here and now.
The deaths of 56 babies and two mothers over a five-year period at a Leeds NHS trust may have been preventable, according to new research.
BBC News has used freedom of information requests to reveal multiple cases of poor care. Separate data shows that Leeds has the highest neonatal mortality rate in Britain.
And now bereaved parents are fighting for a full investigation into care at the trusts’ two main sites, the Leeds General Infirmary and St James’s University Hospital.
In a statement, the trust said the vast majority of births at Leeds were safe, and deaths of mothers and babies were fortunately very rare.
It added that Leeds cares for a higher volume of babies with complex conditions as it is one of a “handful of specialist centres” in Britain.
But the research shows that in each of the 56 deaths, a review had identified care issues it considered may have made a difference to the baby’s outcomes.
And it used figures that compared Leeds to 25 other trusts that provide a similar level of care and can provide the highest level of neonatal intensive services.
Parent’s concerns have been echoed by whistleblower Lisa Elliot, who worked at the two sites in 2023.
Describing the care as “appalling”, she highlighted a failure to listen to patients. “That’s when disasters happen, and a lot of them can be avoided,” she said.
Previous inquiries into baby and maternal deaths have revealed poor staffing and management practices lie at the root of poor care.
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