Rise in hospital ‘corridor care’ is national emergency, union warns

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.

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Source: The Guardian, 3 June 2024

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