Leaving patients in A&E corridors and cupboards is the ‘new normal’
Nurses warn of constant winter crisis, as doctors say UK has fewer hospital beds per head than Romania
PRESSURES on Accident & Emergency departments have become so grave that leaving patients on trolleys in store cupboards due to overcrowding is now “the new normal”, senior nurses have warned.
Financial cuts and specialist nurse “burn-out” mean it is “sheer luck” if patients are seen by trained emergency staff when they come to A&E, they said.
The warnings made at the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) annual congress coincided with complaints that Britain now has half as many hospital beds for its population as Romania, and that NHS wards are “bulging at the seams”.
The “perpetual winter crisis” in A&E now means ambulances are regularly queuing 20-deep outside overstretched hospitals, the RCN congress heard yesterday, while patients who do make it inside are often being left on trolleys in corridors and cupboards due to the lack of capacity.
Some A&E departments are consistently in a “black” or “major incident” status, said nursing representatives, and older patients are often moved at night due to the demand for beds.
Janet Davies, the RCN chief executive and general secretary, said the number of major incidents was now a problem all year round. “Having once been the preserve of the worst weeks of winter, overwhelming pressure and major incidents have sadly become the new normal in our hospitals,” she said.
“Units are having to be closed and operations cancelled due to the level of demand when there’s no extreme weather, and no major outbreak of diseases.”
Janet Yould, the chairman of the RCN Emergency Care Association, said the pressures were prompting an unprecedented attrition rate of emergency nurses, who are often being replaced by non-specialist staff.
“If you or I have got an emergency today with my child, your child, your grandmother, you could go to an emergency department and it would be sheer luck whether you saw a nurse with the right skills and training to be able to treat you,” she said.
Meanwhile, doctors meeting for the annual BMA conference in Belfast demanded an “urgent re-evaluation” of hospital bed numbers amid fears that plans to tackle the NHS deficit could endanger patients further.
Dr Mary McCarthy, a GP from Shropshire, said bed numbers had been “steadily eroded” without a corre- sponding increase in help to support people in their own homes.
She said: “The UK has less than 300 beds per 100,000 population and in Shropshire, where I am, it’s less than 200. In the Irish Republic it’s about 500, in Belgium it’s over 650, in France it’s over 700, in Germany it’s over 800, in Austria it’s over 700, in Romania it’s over 600. Do we really need to keep cutting beds?”
A spokesman for NHS England said that April’s performance figures showed frontline services were “beginning to recover from a challenging winter, with A&E performance nearly 3 per cent higher”. The spokesman added: “The number of patients waiting more than four hours fell by 50,000 and more than nine out of 10 patients are now being admitted, treated or discharged within the target time.”