Over 5,000 members of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), a large UK and international union, have presented evidence showing the dire state of our NHS. Professor Nicola Ranger, RCN general secretary, said the findings are a “wake-up call” to Labour.
The scandal of corridor care across the NHS
The report, entitled On the frontline of the UK’s corridor care crisis, details testimony from nurses who observed patients dying in corridors, on trolleys and in chairs in waiting rooms. The crisis is also defined by nurses treating patients not only in corridors but in storerooms, carparks, offices and even toilets. There, patients have no access to critical equipment like oxygen or vital signs monitoring systems.
There were also multiple testimonies of healthcare staff feeling that the scandal of corridor care has or can delay emergency procedures such as CPR. Further, nurses said corridor care was “routine” at their hospital or even happening “permanently”. Generally, the sheer volume of NHS nurses who have significant experience with corridor care is shocking.
One pointed out that one nurse and a healthcare assistant were looking after 20-30 patients in a corridor.
“Never seen it” so bad
The report notes that selected testimonies already reflect the experience of many nurses. One said:
I was redeployed from my shift in critical care to the emergency department – where I had never worked before. All bays were full and I also had 4 male patients on trolleys in the corridor who had been there since the previous night awaiting a hospital bed as all were admitted.
This made for a concerning and difficult time since the patients were confused, there was no name allocated to a bed area as they were in corridors – staff knew these as ‘spaces’ as they were regularly used.
Another said:
Utilising corridors on daily basis now with patients staying up to 24 hours in these locations. Also seeing patient in the back of ambulances due to lack of flow through the system.
Patients constantly receive poor dignity, are frustrated, in some cases refuse treatment and self discharge against advice due to situation placing them at risk of significant adverse event that would likely not have happened had the system been functioning as intended.
This is demoralising for staff who wish to provide exceptional care, in some cases has led to long term sickness through depression and burn out, and has significantly increased staff turnover as it is no longer viewed as a sustainable career option for nurses and has diluted the overall knowledge and subsequent safety of the department.
I have worked in Emergency care for nearly 20 years and have never seen it as bad as it is today, frankly it is embarrassing.
Underfunding and privatisation of our NHS
Labour aren’t providing enough capital funding to fix the healthcare infrastructure we already have, let alone expanding buildings and technology to meet demand. So how will the corridor crisis end under their administration?
Healthcare leaders have previously said hospitals are “outright dangerous” due to years of underfunding. Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said the NHS needs an extra £6.7bn per year to maintain its estate. Labour has claimed it’s providing an “additional” £13.6bn in capital funding, but that’s actually a £3.1bn increase on the 2023-24 capital budget.
The party is reportedly considering fresh private finance initiative (PFI) scams. That’s instead of the government providing sufficient public funding, the private sector loans the money off the books. Through PFI, the public purse is hugely overcharged for infrastructure in a heist of billions of pounds. Former Blairite advisor and now UK ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson is one of the figures behind the push for Labour to adopt PFI.
Reeves has also walked back the headline figure in Labour’s budget of a £22.6bn increase in NHS day-to-day spending, through announcing a 5% cut to each governmental department. That leaves the spending increase at £7.6bn. This is far short of what’s required for the Long-term Workforce Plan.
Rather than investing in the NHS, Keir Starmer’s Labour seems to be using the crisis as an opportunity for the private healthcare sector (which donates to Labour) to make cash from the struggling service.
On 6 January, Starmer announced that the private sector will deliver an additional million appointments, scans, and operations a year. This is a 20% increase on the current private provision of five million operations, appointments and tests annually.
This is not the answer – as anyone working in the NHS will tell you.
Featured image via the Canary
