Hospital patients dying undiscovered in corridors, report on NHS reveals

Patients are dying in hospital corridors and going undiscovered for hours, while others who suffer heart attacks cannot be given CPR because of overcrowding in walkways, a bombshell report from the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) on the state of the NHS has revealed.

So many patients are being cared for in hospital corridors across the UK that in some cases pregnant women are having miscarriages outside wards while other patients are unable to call for help because they have no call bell and are subjected to “animal-like conditions”, said the RCN.

The RCN warned that patients were “routinely coming to harm” and in some cases dying because vital equipment was not available and staff were too busy to give everyone adequate care.

Dr Adrian Boyle, the leader of Britain’s A&E doctors, said the nurses’ testimonies on which the report was based were so horrendous that it “must be a watershed moment, a line in the sand” and must prompt the government to redouble its efforts to get the NHS working properly again.

Boyle, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said: “I am shocked, appalled and so saddened that this is the level of care we as clinicians are being forced to provide to our patients – people who turn to the NHS and its staff when they are most vulnerable and in need.”

The RCN’s 460-page report, based on “harrowing” descriptions given by 5,400 UK nurses of their experience of working in hospitals, sets out how:

• Patients have died on trolleys and chairs in corridors and waiting rooms in settings where “all the fundamentals of care have broken down.”
• One nurse had seen “cardiac arrests in the corridor with no crash bell, crash trolley, oxygen, defibrillator … straddling a patient doing CPR while everyone watches on.”
• Patients are being given drugs, intravenous infusions and, in one case, a blood transfusion in corridors which are cold, noisy and too cramped to allow them to have loved ones present.
• One nurse had to tell a patient he was dying as other patients were wheeled past and orders were shouted across the unit. They said, “How is it fair to tell someone they are dying in a corridor?”
• Lack of space means patients also being treated in storerooms, car parks, offices and even toilets.

The report came as Wes Streeting, the health and social care secretary, was forced to defend the government’s record on the NHS in an urgent Commons debate about the intense pressures this winter that have left many hospitals overwhelmed in recent weeks.

Streeting responded to Conservative attacks by telling MPs that corridor care “became normalised in NHS hospitals under the previous government. 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.”

But, he added, while ending corridor care was the government’s ambition, “I cannot and will not promise that there will not be patients treated in corridors next year. It will take time to undo the damage that has been done to our NHS.”

Read the RCN report: On the frontline of the UK’s corridor care crisis

Read full story

Source: The Guardian, 16 January 2025