A frontline nurse paints a harrowing picture of overcrowded emergency departments in Britain, where patients are treated in corridors due to a severe lack of beds. The article highlights the dangerous consequences of this overcrowding, including a patient dying during a cardiac arrest because there was no room for the crash team to reach him. The nurse recounts a day filled with chaos, including a mental health patient having a breakdown in the corridor and paramedics performing 'dump and run' procedures, leaving patients unattended.
READ MORE:When I had last set eyes on the man who had been brought in with a suspected heart condition, he was wedged in a wheelchair into an alcove normally used to store hospital equipment.
There was literally no room to reach him, less still to lie him on the floor and perform CPR, something which has become not uncommon, along with nurses straddling patients on trolleys performing CPR as everyone watches.
It’s a picture I certainly recognise only too well after 25 years on the frontline of nursing in a busy Greater London hospital. Half the population of England will end up in A&E every year by 2034 if the NHS does not 'go for broke' and shift more care from hospitals to the community, a top doctor warned recently.
Sadly, this again is not uncommon, but it’s still hard to see frightened children and elderly patients seeing things that should be unfolding behind a locked door. Help with checking a drug, moving a patient, taking a patient to the toilet ... the list goes on. There’s a reason working on the corridor is known as ‘running the gauntlet’.
On that occasion, I spotted in the nick of time that the man, who was in his early 50s and had been brought in suffering chest pain, looked very unwell and confused. I was able to get him another cylinder, but one more hour or so and it could have been a very different story. Joanna Ormesher tweeted this photograph of the main corridor at Royal Blackburn Hospital in Lancashire recently, saying: 'Patients left out in cold corridors to be gawped at like exhibits in a zoo. No patient dignity and poor patient care. Shameful at best'
All the while people tried to squeeze past to go in and out. The weather was appalling, cold blasts of air made the doors rattle. Add in the fact that, however vigilant we are, it’s difficult to get access to computer records to check a patient’s history means that medication can be delayed or worse, wrongly dispensed.
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