NHS patients die in ambulances outside A&E as corridor care 'extends to car parks'

Corridor care has “extended into the car park” of hospitals and one of the riskiest places for patients to be is now in an ambulance outside A&E, nurses have warned. They said seriously unwell and injured patients were receiving “unacceptable” levels of care in outside emergency departments which were too full to accept them.

One told delegates at the Royal College of Nursing's annual conference how a patient had died after waiting in the back of an ambulance for more than 24 hours, adding: “This is not care, it is abuse." The highest-risk place in the is now “the back of an ambulance”, said nurse Alison Milliken, who proposed the debate at the conference in Liverpool.

She said: “Across the four UK nations we see what can only be described as a crisis: unprecedented delay in the ambulance handovers are leaving inpatients stuck in ambulances for hours, sometimes entire shifts, outside that simply cannot cope.

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“These vehicles are not equipped for prolonged care. They are not designated to be treatment areas. They are not staffed for extended patient care, and yet they have quietly become overflow spaces and an informal extension of our emergency departments.”

It comes four months after the Royal College of Nursing published a harrowing 460-page report on corridor care in the , saying it had become normalised and is the worst it has ever been.

In the landmark report testimony from 5,000 nurses laid bare the consequences of a decade of NHS under-funding with patients spending hours slowly dying on trolleys in busy corridors and a dead patient being found under a pile of coats in a .

Seven in ten nurses said they were daily delivering care in over-crowded or unsuitable places like corridors, converted cupboards, bathrooms, cloakrooms, paediatric recovery rooms with children in and even car parks - something that had previously been a temporary measure for emergencies.

Nurses on Tuesday unanimously agreed to pressure the to decide who should take responsibility for the lives of patients waiting outside hospital A&Es. Currently, there are no rules saying whether ambulance or hospital staff should take charge in these situations, meaning patients can end up without anyone taking overall responsibility for their welfare.

Denise Kelly, chair of the trade union committee, told the conference: “This isn't just corridor care. It's been extended into the back of the car park, into the back of an ambulance, and it's becoming dangerously normalised… It's unsafe, and it's utterly unacceptable for our staff and, most importantly, for all patients.”

Alison Milliken said patients being cared for in ambulances was part of the wider corridor care crisis. She added: “We are seeing the same dangerous trends spilling beyond hospital walls and into ambulance bays."

It follows figures released last month which showed half of ambulance crews had waited at least six hours to handover patients to A&E, while one in seven had waited outside emergency departments for more than 12 hours. More than two thirds of 600 ambulance staff surveyed by the Unison union said they had seen patients deteriorate during long waits to enter A&E. One in 20 said a patient had died in their care while waiting.

The Department for Health and Social Care has been contacted for comment.