A damning new report from the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) exposes the harrowing reality of patients receiving end-of-life care in overcrowded NHS corridors. Nurses describe the emotional toll of inadequate hospital spaces and the normalization of substandard care, highlighting the urgent need for increased NHS funding.
Nurses have unveiled the harsh reality of working on the NHS frontline, describing situations where patients spend their final moments on trolleys in overcrowded corridors. At a briefing in central London, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) released a damning 460-page report titled ' corridor care ', detailing distressing accounts from healthcare professionals about the normalization of inadequate hospital spaces for care throughout the year.
The report states that the situation is the worst it has ever been. A visibly emotional nurse shared an experience from just two weeks ago at the RCN headquarters: '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.' This nurse further detailed the emotional toll it took when the patient's family expressed gratitude for finally securing a bed, despite the patient having spent eight hours of her last moments next to a patient detoxing and being abusive, and another who was loudly in pain. '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 shared their own experience: '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 highlighted that the testimonies from 5,000 nurses reveal the dire consequences of a decade of NHS underfunding. Instances of substandard care reported included a couple being informed about their miscarriage care options in a crowded corridor and an incontinent person with dementia being changed beside a vending machine. Nurses expressed feelings of 'ashamed' and 'guilty' regarding the level of care they could provide. They also recounted experiences of being spat at and threatened with acid attacks. A senior support worker from a major acute trust in the South East said yesterday: '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.
NHS Healthcare Underfunding Nurses Corridor Care Patient Safety Overcrowding Mortality UK
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