Healthwatch England on 'Corridor Care'

Nurses warned ‘corridor care’ put patients at risk as staff were unable to access vital equipment such as oxygen, heart monitors and suction equipment, and did not have the time and space to provide CPR.

Healthwatch England responded to the news - highlighting the report mirrors what we hear from patients, with our comment featuring on BBC News: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgly9z4z62do

Chris McCann, deputy chief executive at Healthwatch England said:

“These devastating stories shared by nurses in the report by the RCN echo experiences that people tell us about. This includes a 75-year-old who spent 15 hours in an A&E corridor chair, eight hours on a trolley in a storage room and a further two hours in a ward corridor before finally being admitted.

We applaud nurses for calling out this undignified and unsafe practice. Patients say they’re witnessing stressed and overstretched staff who are valiantly trying to cope with these extreme pressures. 

As a first step, we’re joining with other organisations in calling on the government to commit to transparency on the true extent of corridor care by ensuring figures are published for each hospital on the number of people being held in corridors or other inappropriate spaces.

We need to know how many patients are affected, why and for how long and the extent to which people are harmed as a result. This would help inform the new emergency care plan being developed by the government.  The plan must also look at other NHS pressures that impact on hospital care, such as a lack of timely GP appointments, and hospital discharge delays due to problems arranging ongoing social care for people, which stop beds being freed up for new inpatients.”