Corridors are no place to die, but that is what is happening in British hospitals now as the worst winter crisis in years crams every corner and cupboard in A&Es with very sick patients waiting for beds. Some die on trolleys and chairs, nurses report to their Royal College. They talk of “straddling a patient doing CPR while everyone watches on”. The Whittington hospital in north London and Queen’s hospital in Romford, Essex, have both advertised for “corridor care” nurses. The heath secretary, Wes Streeting, says he will never allow this to become “normalised” as it did under the previous government.
But the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine suggests it already has, declaring: “This must be a watershed moment.” Last week, 20 hospitals declared “critical incidents”, because they were unable to cope with the demand for care. For nurses, the crisis means changing frail, incontinent patients beside vending machines and treating people in storerooms, car parks, offices and toilets, sometimes with just one nurse and one healthcare assistant coping with 20 or 30 patients in spaces blocked with trolleys. Barking, Redbridge and Havering NHS trust has resorted to putting up posters in its corridors asking people to lobby their MPs for £35m to make its A&E capable of coping with double the number of patients it was built for. It so happens that one of their MPs is Streeting.
