Harry Lyness had hardly ever been in hospital, according to his son John. The former Royal and Merchant Navy serviceman was 95 when he was admitted to the Royal Liverpool Hospital after a fall at his Wavertree care home in 2023.
“It was so overcrowded. They just couldn’t fit him in,” John said.
“He was on this big long corridor, and all along it were plugs for the staff to plug in the medical equipment they needed to use to treat people.
“The corridor looked about 30 or 40 yards long, and it was bed-to-bed all along the corridor, and just a massive big queue of trolleys.
“It looked to me like what you’d expect to see if there had been a major incident, a fire or an explosion.”
As the hours passed, John repeatedly asked staff when his father might be moved to a room, but, he said, nobody could tell him.
John, now 65, told the BBC the memory still upsets him. More than anything, it was the “indignity” his father endured.
“I was there overnight, sitting next to him on a little fold-down chair,” he said. “There was no privacy for him if he needed to go to the toilet. They brought one of these screens to pull round him so he could have a wee.”
The NHS agrees corridor care is unacceptable.