Shock testimony of NHS nurse reveals harrowing reality of A&E today

When I had last set eyes on the man who had been brought in with a suspected heart condition, he was in a wheelchair wedged into an alcove normally used to store hospital equipment.

He was clearly seriously ill and should have been in a cubicle attached to a monitor – but then you could say the same for the dozens of others, crammed into the corridor outside my hospital’s frantically busy A&E department, the only physical space available left to us.

I say ‘space’ – there wasn’t any. Even the corridor was filled to capacity with patients on trolleys, in wheelchairs and waiting room chairs, along with other ‘walking wounded’ patients and relatives, all trying to navigate their way to and from the vending machine at the far end.

So crammed, that when the man in the wheelchair suffered a cardiac arrest it was impossible for the crash team to get to him to resuscitate him.

There was literally no room to reach him, less still to lie him on the floor and perform CPR.

That man died right there in his chair as his frantic wife screamed for help.

It was – and is – inhumane, but then I could use that word to describe a lot of what is unfolding in our emergency departments these days, and in which corridor nursing, which should really only be used in exceptional circumstances, has become a daily reality without which A&E departments couldn’t function at all.

This last week the sheer monstrous scale of the problem was laid bare in a report from the Royal College of Nursing, which featured the testimony of more than 5,000 nurses and exposed the daily horrors unfolding in emergency departments up and down the country.

It’s a picture I certainly recognise only too well after 25 years on the frontline of nursing in a busy Greater London hospital.

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Source: The Daily Mail, 24 January 2025