Tearful nurses reveal stunning actuality of NHS hall care as ‘affected person discovered useless underneath coats’

Nurses have revealed the reality they now face on the NHS frontline as patients spend their final hours slowly dying on trolleys in busy corridors.

Medics spoke out at a briefing in central London to unveil the Royal College of Nurses bombshell 460-page report on corridor care. Harrowing accounts of care in inappropriate hospital spaces has become normalised all year round, the report concluded, saying it is the worst it has ever been.

Speaking at the RCN headquarters in central London, one tearful nurse said: “Two weeks ago I had an elderly patient who had been in the corridor for six hours, and then a doctor told me we believe she’s ending, nearing the end of her life. She still remained in that corridor another two hours while we tried to find an appropriate bed space.

“What was really emotional was the family couldn’t thank me enough for getting that space organized, but she spent eight hours, nearing the end of her life in front of a patient who was detoxing from alcohol, vomiting and being really abusive, and another patient in front of them who was in a lot of pain and who was screaming and shouting.

“There was no dignified care at all and the family was thankful for the basic fix that we did do. If that was my mum, I would have been horrified. If that was your mom, how would that make you feel that they laid them on a crappy trolley in a crowded corridor while they died?”

Another nurse said: “You’re so task focused it’s hard to take a minute to stop, talk to your patient, see who’s there. It’s just next one in, next one in, and you go out, call their name, they don’t answer. You do that three or four times or the next few hours so you put them down as a ‘self discharge’ because who the hell wants to sit in a waiting room for hours with people coughing and vomiting. Then it takes someone to realise there is someone under a pile of coats who has passed away.”

The RCN said its testimony from 5,000 nurses lays bare the consequences of a decade of NHS under-funding. Examples of poor care included a couple told their miscarriage care options in a crowded corridor and an incontinent person with dementia being changed next to a vending machine.

Nurses told of feeling “ashamed” and “guilty” for the standard of care they were able to give. They told of being spat at and threatened with acid attacks.

Speaking yesterday one senior support worker in a major acute trust in the South East said: “You’re going to have a defib thrown at you in the middle of a waiting room, you’re going to have people scream at you saying ‘you’re the reason my mum died!’ You take these things home with you and it stays with you. It makes a hole in your soul.”

The annual rate of NHS funding rises – to keep pace with the ageing population – slowed from almost 6% under New Labour to only 2% under the Conservatives, according to an analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). The annual rise average since the NHS was founded is around 4% which is still low by European standards.