“A corridor is never a safe place for a patient,” warn NHS nurses in the North in a heartbreaking new report which lays bare the state of the health service’s crisis.
The report from the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) features testimony from nurses around the UK who recall examples of how “corridor care” has become normal in their hospitals. The nurses include many from across the union’s northern region – and they share how this impacts on the care patients receive and could even cost them their lives.
The nurses say how patients in corridors get “no peace or rest” and that “nursing anywhere but [in] dedicated spaces always will compromise patient safety”. Others highlighted how the practice left patients without privacy or dignity and many said it was pushing them to leave the NHS.
The RCN’s chief executive Professor Nicola Ranger said in the report: “Corridor care and temporary escalation spaces all sound innocuous as phrases. All of this wording is misleading – and perhaps deliberately – as this is what it really means. Nursing staff trying to care for patients in corridors, storerooms, car parks, offices and even toilets.
“No access to safety critical facilities like oxygen, suction or monitoring equipment. Fire escapes blocked. Patients having diagnoses and discussions in public, and being treated, fed, washed and toileted – and sadly even dying – with no privacy.”
This comes a day after Health Secretary Wes Streeting told MPs that he cannot “promise that there won’t be patients treated in corridors next year”.
Mr Streeting said the Government would “never accept or tolerate” people being treated in “unsafe, undignified” conditions but it would “take time to undo the damage” done to the NHS by the previous government.
In the report, nurses from the Northern region – which stretches across the North East and Cumbria – were asked about occasions where they had been forced to deliver care in an “inappropriate setting” and then also how “patient care or safety was compromised”.
In answer, one anonymous nurse in the region said: “Nursing anywhere but a dedicated spaces always will compromise patient safety. Every patient has the potential to deteriorate or for their needs to change quickly, therefore a corridor is never a safe place for a patient.
“I was extremely upset that this patient was sent up to me. Even more so having to explain to her family that this was the case. We were told by higher ups that we should treat this as normal now. Whereas nursing people in corridors is anything but normal.”
Another nurse, who had been working in an emergency department, said: “Those poor people who felt ill could get no peace or rest as they were in the middle of the department’s hustle, bustle, and noise. There were no tables to rest food and drink on – the whole situation was undignified and awful.
“I felt embarrassed to work for the NHS and for the first time, I could see it was broken. Never in my 30-year career could I have imagined this would become a ‘norm’ but it is.”
Speaking about the report, Prof Ranger 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.”
Saffron Cordery, interim chief executive, NHS Providers, said the testimonies within the report were “harrowing”, while Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told ITV’s Good Morning Britain on Thursday he agreed. He said: “It is harrowing. And I’m afraid to say I don’t think we needed a report like this to know this.”
Shadow health secretary Ed Argar said it was “down to Wes Streeting to act now” to increase capacity in hospitals. “Frontline healthcare staff work incredibly hard to care for patients, and it is entirely unacceptable for them to be obliged to deliver care in this way.”
Mr Streeting added: “Despite NHS staff doing their level best, the experiences of patients this winter are unacceptable. Annual winter pressures, which will always exist, should not automatically lead to an annual winter crisis.
“We have ended the strikes, so for the first winter in three years staff are on the front line not the picket line, and protected more patients with flu vaccinations than last year, but there is much more to do.
“It will take time to turn the health service around so patients receive the standards of care they deserve, but it can be done. Through our Plan for Change this Government is making the investment and fundamental reform needed to make sure the NHS can be there for us when we need it, once again.”
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