Nurses at an NHS Accident and Emergency Department have been caught on film laughing about how they weren’t hitting targets after they admitted one of their patients had already waited 46 hours for care.
A Channel 4 Dispatches reporter went undercover as a trainee healthcare assistant at the A&E department of the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, exposing the deplorable quality of NHS treatment.
In a documentary shown this evening, nurses were caught laughing about their failure at ‘hitting targets’, as the programme’s footage left an expert in disbelief at the ‘unacceptable’ practices.
It came as 400,000 patients across the country have had to wait more than 24 hours for care.
The startling show revealed:
Sick patients waiting overnight in the ‘Fit to Sit’ area, with a suspected stroke case sitting in the waiting room for 24 hours.
A man was forced to urinate on a trolley in full view of 30 staff, patients and members of the public.
A dementia patient ripped out their cannula and was left in a room covered in their blood when they were supposed to have been watched over.
A makeshift ward was set up on the X-ray corridor, which was isolated from doctors and nurses and had no sinks and insufficient plug sockets.
Shocking levels of hygiene, with dirty bedpans, were left by staff without being cleaned up.
Patients were forced to wait for up to four and a half hours in ambulance queues. Some ambulance crews who could not wait just dumped their patients in the ‘Ambulance Reception Area’ without a proper handover.
A staff worker at the hospital in Shropshire smiled throughout the video when she said a patient had to wait 46 hours, or almost two days, to be seen.
Going through their waiting times list, they said: ‘So… longest waiting… 46 hours is the longest one. It’s meant to be four hours!
‘So we’re not hitting any targets.’
They added: ‘I’d say we have at least like, 40 breeches a day.’
According to the broadcaster’s Freedom of Information requests, 54,000 people were in A&E for more than 48 hours, and over 19,000 stayed for 72 hours.
Additionally, the number of patients waiting longer than a day for treatment has increased by 5% from the previous year, with thousands more patients waiting longer than 48 hours.
In one moment, the reporter spoke to an elderly couple who said they had been waiting in the Shrewsbury hospital’s ‘Fit 2 Sit’ area for 30 hours.
A suspected stroke victim had also been waiting for more than 24 hours on a hard chair.
Horrified at the desperate state of the situation, one nurse could be heard saying: ’24 hours in Fit 2 Sit before anything’s happened for her. That’s disgusting care.’
Responding to footage, Professor Alf Collins, Trustee of the Patients Association and former NHS England Clinical Director for personalised care said: ‘It’s dreadful. People waiting just far, far too long.
‘It’s almost becoming acceptable now. It’s almost becoming the standard of care that people expect.
‘Sad to say. I don’t think this is exceptional.’
And Dr Adrian Boyle, President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, added: ‘I don’t think this is unique to this hospital by any stretch of the imagination.
‘The things we’ve seen here today are clearly not just confined to winter. It was a year-round crisis in emergency care.
‘Spending two days in an emergency department is, you know, it’s worse than spending two days in an airport lounge. These are people who are sitting in uncomfortable seats where the lights never go off.
‘There’s constant noise, there’s constant stress. There’s no end in sight. People will miss their routine medications. They’ll be next to people who can infect them with other diseases. You know, it’s just not acceptable.’
An old guy was made to urinate in a pot in front of up to thirty individuals, including staff workers and other patients, in another horrible incident.
After helping him to go to the toilet in public, the horrified reporter said: ‘We’ve got people having to go to the toilet in public in the corridor. It’s not OK.
‘If that was my family member, I’d be fuming.’
It’s an absolute disgrace, and I’m not sure anyone is going to be saved by anyone in any hospital. We are literally putting our lives in the hands of people who are overworked and fed up – it’s actually disturbing.
Once upon a time GPs worked from home and used one of their rooms as a surgery. Patients waited in another room or hallway, it was never a problem and you always got seen by a doctor. Then everything went downhill when they introduced special buildings to house several doctors and brought in those receptionists who always seem to want to know what’s wrong with you. Well, if I knew what was wrong with me, I wouldn’t need to see a doctor, would I?
For the most part, nurses are now lazy. I have sat in A&E or a bed on a ward while I watched the staff just chatting, doing absolutely nothing. If you want information, it’s almost impossible, and the ward staff don’t take the time to read notes on patients under their care.
Maybe after they got a taste of doing practically nothing during the pandemic, they decided to do the bare minimum.
The NHS is regarded as the world’s envy. It’s not, at all! Even if it’s free, the quality is rather poor and it’s not the finest. However, paying for it would be the other option, and that wouldn’t be much better.
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