LONDON: Patients are dying in the corridors of Britain’s hospitals. Pregnant women are receiving miscarriage treatments in semipublic places. Incontinent patients are cleaned next to vending machines. Those are just some of the shocking revelations in a report published Thursday by the Royal College of Nursing, a British nursing union. In the report, nurses described an overcrowding crisis that they said has led to a collapse in care, confidentiality and dignity across the country’s National Health Service.
“Vulnerable people are being stripped of their dignity and nursing staff are being denied access to vital lifesaving equipment,” Nicola Ranger, the general secretary and CEO of the union, said in a statement. The nation’s healthcare staff had reached a “breaking point,” she added in the report.
The 460-page report, which features anonymised testimony from over 5,400 nurses surveyed from Dec 18, 2024 to Jan 11, is the latest mayday from British medical professionals. The union granted its members anonymity in order to speak freely, preventing repercussions from employers and protecting patient confidentiality, a spokesperson said.
Doctors and nurses have struggled to care for the nearly 70 million people in the UK after years of challenges, including chronic underinvestment in the NHS under Conservative-led govts that held power from 2010 to 2024.
The report described how patients have had to wait for CPR as nurses struggled to manoeuvre through a cramped corridor to get there in time. Often, patients endured unhygienic conditions, nurses said. Some had been sprayed with each other’s vomit. Incontinent patients are cleaned in corridors without privacy. The toll is particularly evident for dying people. Patients have had to face their own deaths in cramped and busy places, according to the report, without any privacy. A corpse was discovered in hallways hours after death, a nurse said.
“This must be a watershed moment, a line in the sand,” Dr Adrian Boyle, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said in a statement. Boyle was one of several leading British physicians to express solidarity with the nurses. He called the testimonies “harrowing.”
The report, which de scribes a crisis of “corridor care,” comes just months after another blockbuster report found that the NHS was in “critical” condition. Patients routinely waited hours for treatment as doctors tried to work without adequate medical equipment or sufficient space in hospitals, according to that report, which was commissioned by the govt.
Many Britons see a functioning NHS — which was created after World War II and delivers healthcare that is free at the point of use to all Britons through a tax-funded model — as a core obligation of their govt.
