Welsh NHS staff unite against disgraceful spectacle of ‘corridor care’

Welsh NHS medical staff have issued a call to end the use of so-called ‘corridor care’. What’s more, they demonstrated outside the Senedd yesterday, 10 December, to show they mean business.

British Medical Association (BMA) and Royal College of Nursing (RCN) members gathered outside the Welsh parliament in their dozens. They timed their demonstration to coincide with a Senedd debate on a petition from the two organizations. It called for immediate action to address what the BMA described as:

the increasingly normalised spectacle of patients having to be cared for in corridors and other inappropriate locations.

Because of a combination of understaffing and pressures on the overall NHS, staff placing patients in unsuitable areas of hospitals. Often, this situation can last many hours, either whilst patients wait for treatment, or even whilst they receive treatment.

Petition to the Senedd

The petition itself attracted over 10,000 signatures. It calls for the proper recording and reporting of corridor care. It also pushes for the categorisation of the treatment of patients seated in chairs for over 24 hours as ‘never events’:

Never Events are defined as Serious Incidents that are wholly preventable because guidance or safety recommendations that provide strong systemic protective barriers are available at a national level and should have been implemented by all healthcare providers.

Beyond that, the petition also demands that the Welsh government put an immediate stop to the reduction of hospital bed numbers. Rather, it should mount a national review and provide a fully costed workforce plan to guarantee the future of the NHS in Wales.

BMA Welsh consultants committee chair Manish Adke was among those present at the Senedd protest. He stated that:

As health professionals it is extremely distressing to see patients in unsafe, inappropriate spaces whilst they are at their most vulnerable.

What’s worse is that this practice is becoming systematically normalised and that is completely unacceptable. It is not what we trained for, it’s not the care we want to give and it’s putting patients at risk of serious harm.

Without an allocated bed space we cannot stabilise patients with fluids, antibiotics or invasive lines. This adds serious risk to patients and leads to poorer outcomes and adds a greater risk of death.

‘The Welsh Government must act now because lives depend on it.’

‘Unsafe and unacceptable’

Speaking to the BMA, Welsh healthcare professionals in Wales have described the often-harrowing conditions in which they’re working. One doctor explained:

I was the on-call medical consultant over the weekend. [I] reviewed frail, elderly patients sitting on chairs in the corridor, makeshift waiting rooms and ambulance. There was an octogenarian with cerebral bleed, a confused woman with advanced dementia. This is unsafe clinical practice and unacceptable.

‘I had a patient with hip fracture waiting on ambulance corridor more than 16 hours,’ another doctor told the BMA.

‘It was cold, undignified and she used nappies because due to pain she could not go to the toilet. She was on my trauma list, and it was heartbreaking to witness it.’

Emergency care consultant Ryan Hobbs stated that it had become worryingly commonplace to see patients being put-up in non-clinical areas. He said:

The use of corridor space as boarding areas has become normalised within emergency departments. When staff report that the department is full, the presence of three designated boarding spaces is routinely cited as additional capacity, rather than an exception.

Patients occupying corridor boarding spaces are often alone, without the support of family members. This situation is especially concerning for elderly patients, who are made even more vulnerable as they are kept for long periods in areas which, by necessity, are open-access and often have high volumes of traffic passing through them.

He also added that:

Staff endeavour to provide the best care possible but these suboptimal environments make “basic” care – help with toileting, bathing and feeding – difficult.

Staff are also exposed to physical risks when attending to patients in inappropriate spaces [and]
the moral injury to staff, particularly junior nurses working long shifts in suboptimal conditions, is also considerable.

Recommendations to the Welsh government

Fortunately, the BMA and the RCN had a number of recommendations to help the Senedd eliminate corridor care for good.

These included including restoring the numbers of district nurses back to 2010 levels. For comparison, the population of Wales has grown by 136,000 since 2010, but the number of nurses has shrunk.

Likewise, the Senedd should also restore funding for primary care services. This, in turn, would increase the recruitment and training of GPs.

The petition also urged the Welsh government to adopt an approach built around a preventative and early interventionist approach to healthcare. Alongside this, it recommended that focusing on population and public health would alleviate the burden on the NHS by reducing emergency service demands.

Featured image via BMA