Inside the A&E crisis: ‘We were lined up so patients wouldn’t see the bodies’

An NHS whistleblower has sacrificed his career to capture on hidden camera the brutal reality of working in an ambulance service.

After watching yet another patient die needlessly in the back of his ambulance, Daniel Waterhouse became a whistleblower. That decision would end his career with the NHS at the age of only 30.

Waterhouse, from Finchley, north London, said his decision to go undercover for a Channel 4 Dispatches programme to be broadcast on Thursday was not easy.

“I thought about it for quite a while,” said Waterhouse, an emergency medical technician who wore hidden cameras and microphones while on shift for the East of England Ambulance Service. “It was a moral choice, and there’s a caveat to that as well, because going undercover in those situations could be considered immoral and will draw criticism I’m sure.

“But I think patient safety outweighs that, and those occasions were so strong in my head that I thought, ‘If only some change can happen, where some people don’t have to go through that and die or suffer permanent disability, then it would be worth it’.”

Read full story (paywalled)

Source: The Times, 3 March 2023