NHS nurses should be protected against ‘ethical damage’ amid chaos on hospital frontlines

Every day nurses go to work and see people in their lowest moments of grief and pain.

It takes a special kind of person to thrive in that environment but these are people who have chosen a vocation that in many cases defines who they are.

That is why when they cannot give good care – when patients die needlessly in situations where they are robbed of their dignity – this inflicts “moral injury” on the carers.

You could immediately hear the emotion in their voices as they opened up about the problems they face yesterday at a media briefing at the Royal College of Nursing headquarters in central London.

Clutching a tissue, one told of patients on trolleys, with their relatives, being told they are dying in crowded corridors.

Tearful nurses said they feel powerless as patients spend hours slowly dying in a busy corridor while they await a bed becoming available on a ward. They described finding a dead patient under a pile of coats.

The survey tells of pregnant women miscarrying in corridors, while other nurses say they cannot access patients to give proper CPR when they have heart attacks.

Clearly repeated exposure to such experiences had not yet robbed these skilled professionals of their ability to empathise but the danger is they eventually have to shut themselves off to human suffering – or quit for the sake of their own mental health.

The bombshell RCN report with input from 5,000 nurses revealed they now have to deliver care in walk-in cupboards, car parks, bathrooms, cloakrooms, bereavement rooms and paediatric recovery rooms with children in.

Of all the harrowing accounts, one of the most powerful was a young nurse explaining why she still sticks it out in the NHS in the hope at some point things will start to improve.

She said: “I love my patients, they are like me. When you can give that care, it’s such a beautiful feeling to go home and feel like I made a difference.

“You can’t change the world, but you can change the world for one human being at a certain time, and that’s what pushes you on. But at the moment we can’t do that enough.”