Kathy’s experience was no better. Sent in by her GP one morning earlier this year with a suspected eye infection, she waited 36 hours in a chair, alone, in a hospital in the East of England before being told her blurred vision was caused by a brain tumour.<\/p>\n
“It was horrendous\u2026 I got home and threw up. I was exhausted and broken.”<\/p>\n
Nurses, who asked to remain anonymous, described burnout and impossible conditions. <\/p>\n
One recalled a shift where the corridor was lined with patients. A body had to be wheeled past them on its way to the mortuary. Later, another patient went into cardiac arrest in the same corridor.<\/p>\n
“Those frail patients watched chest compressions. There’s no dignity in that.”<\/p>\n
Another nurse said her emergency department felt “like a war zone”. She described a patient who died unnoticed in the corridor. <\/p>\n
“He’d started to stiffen because he had been there for so long, dead, with no-one noticing. It’s horrific to think someone’s loved one died with no one near them.”<\/p>\n
Ministers have pledged to eradicate the practice by 2029.<\/p>\n
Health Secretary James Murray said: “Corridor care is unacceptable, undignified and has no place in our NHS. <\/p>\n
“That is why, for the first time, we are publishing this data to shine a spotlight on where the problems are greatest and ensure trusts get the support they need, with the vast majority of corridor care concentrated in a small number of organisations.”<\/p>\n
NHS England pointed out despite it being May – not normally a month when hospitals face the most acute pressures – it had been particularly busy because of the heatwave.<\/p>\n
Royal College of Nursing general secretary Prof Nicola Ranger said the figures were “alarming” and showed unsafe and undignified practice was rife.<\/p>\n
“Behind these figures aren’t just patients and families suffering, but nursing staff demoralised at being forced to deliver poor care, day in day out,” she added.<\/p>\n
Siva Anandaciva, of The King’s Fund health think tank, said: “These figures confirm the scale of something that should never have been normalised in the NHS.”<\/p>\n
He said it was a “positive step” to have the figures in the public domain, but added: “We have had data on long waits in other parts of the NHS for decades \u2013 including A&E departments – and it has done little to stop their rise.”<\/p>\n
Additional reporting by Kris Bramwell. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kathy’s experience was no better. Sent in by her GP one morning earlier this year with a suspected…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":632993,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-632992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/632993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=632992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=632992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}