Overcrowding is forcing hospitals to treat so many patients in corridors and storerooms that it constitutes a “national emergency”, the UK’s nursing union has said.
The growing and widespread practice is endangering patients’ safety by leaving them without oxygen or easily able to attract staff’s attention, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) warned.
“Corridor care” also deprives patients of their dignity because they have to undergo intimate examinations in view of others and do not have easy access to a toilet, it added.
Hospitals become so stretched that some patients have died while being looked after in what the RCN said were “inappropriate areas”, which can also include car parks and fracture rooms.
The RCN called on the NHS to recognise the serious risk “corridor care” posed to patients by recording every time it happened and classifying it as a “never event”. The latter would put it on a par with incidents such as surgeons operating on the wrong part of someone’s body.
A new RCN report, based on a survey of 11,000 nurses across the UK, includes evidence of the impact on patients and staff of care being delivered in such settings. One nurse said: “You wouldn’t treat a dog this way.”
Nurses described patients being told they had cancer while they were in public areas, and someone with dementia being left for hours without oxygen in a corridor.
Prof Nicola Ranger, the RCN’s acting general secretary and chief executive, will say in her keynote address at the start of the union’s annual conference: “Our once world-leading services are treating patients in car parks and store cupboards. The elderly are languishing on chairs for hours on end and patients are dying in corridors.
“The horror of this situation cannot be understated. It is a national emergency for patient safety.
“Care being delivered in front of a fire exit isn’t care. Signing do-not-resuscitate-orders in a corridor isn’t care. Receiving a cancer diagnosis in a public area isn’t care. It’s a nightmare for all involved.”
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine, which represents A&E doctors, said patients being kept in non-clinical parts of hospitals was “disgraceful, dehumanising and dangerous”.
Its president, Dr Adrian Boyle, said: “As shocking as they [the RCN’s findings] are, treating patients in corridors, cupboards and car parks is the daily reality our members and their colleagues face every time they go to work.
“This shameful situation is one of the most visible indicators of a system under huge pressure and not functioning as it should be.”
He urged whoever formed the government after the 4 July general election to increase the number of permanent staffed beds in hospitals and to finally implement long-overdue “significant and substantial reform” of social care to reduce the number of people needing hospital care.
Matthew Stewart, a staff nurse in critical care and an RCN representative, said nurses across the UK had noticed a sharp increase in “corridor care” in recent years.
“Probably, pre-pandemic, we would have the occasional corridor patient, but that was based on when we were, for example, cleaning their bed space or something like that. It was a very short period of time and in a very rare situation that would happen.”
He said nurses were left unable to care properly for patients stuck in corridors, store cupboards or waiting rooms, because those places did not have equipment.
“In a typical bed space, you’ve obviously got oxygen, you’ve got suction, you’ve got your monitoring or you’ve got monitoring on machines which you can grab pretty quick. And you’ve got things like drip stands, so you can give your medications. In corridors or store cupboards, there’s just not the equipment there which we should have.”
“Corridor care” appears to have grown as more hospitals in England have adopted a “continuous flow model”, in which ambulance crews leave patients at A&E instead of in their vehicle so they can get back on the road faster to answer more 999 calls.
In a blogpost in February for the Health Foundation, Heather Wilson, a nurse in a central London A&E unit who is also a policy officer with the thinktank, warned: “The increasing frequency of corridor care is alarming … [and] risks normalising substandard care delivery … Patients can feel invisible out of the sight of staff.”
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said: “NHS nurses are sounding the alarm on the appalling state of the NHS after 14 years of Conservative neglect. Patients and staff alike can see that the NHS is broken.”
NHS England said it was trying to relieve the intense pressure on hospitals by creating more GP appointments; increasing the number of “virtual wards”, in which patients are cared for at home; providing extra beds and discharging patients on time.
A spokesperson said: “The NHS is facing significant demand for services and quality of care remains a priority. One of the key ambitions of our urgent and emergency care recovery plan is to improve patient flow in and out of hospitals.
“The NHS delivered an extra 5,000 core beds this winter, alongside measures to help patients avoid an A&E admission in the first place. Tools like our world-leading virtual ward programme and discharge lounges all help to improve care for patients.”
