‘A war zone’: North Wales hospital corridor care reality laid bare in Senedd exchange
Almost 90,000 patients have been treated in hospital corridors in north Wales over the past three years, a North Wales MS told the Senedd on Tuesday, citing a television investigation that included accounts from patients and staff at Glan Clwyd Hospital.
Darren Millar MS (Conservative, North Wales) raised the findings of Y Byd ar Bedwar, broadcast the previous evening, during questions to First Minister Eluned Morgan.
The programme featured Steve Jones, a 68-year-old man who spent 44 hours in a corridor at Glan Clwyd Hospital in agony with a gangrenous gallbladder.
Mr Jones described the situation there as “a war zone,” Mr Millar told the Senedd.
Doctors tried to send him home due to bed pressures. His wife, a former nurse, pressed for a further examination that led to emergency surgery.
“If it hadn’t been for her intervention, he would not have been rushed into emergency surgery to remove his gallbladder,” Mr Millar said.
A nurse from Ysbyty Gwynedd who was also interviewed said the NHS is in crisis and that “corridor care is a daily occurrence — it never used to be — and that staff now feel ashamed of the substandard quality of care that they’re being forced to provide.”
Mr Millar also described an account from Nadia Wainwright of Henllan, who witnessed an elderly woman die on a trolley in a corridor at Glan Clwyd’s emergency department.
A sheet was eventually pulled over the woman’s face while other patients were still being treated nearby.
“It’s not good enough. It really isn’t good enough,” Mr Millar said.
“I’m afraid that people are now frightened to go into these hospitals for treatment.”
He called on the First Minister to apologise to patients, families and staff, and to declare a health emergency and surge bed capacity.
NHS beds in Wales have fallen from 15,500 in 1997 to less than 10,500 today, he told the Senedd.
The First Minister said she had not watched the programme.
“I think the situation is absolutely unacceptable,” she said. “It is deeply upsetting for the people who are waiting to be treated there.”
Ms Morgan said corridor care is “unacceptable” and is Welsh Government policy to eliminate.
She said NHS staffing has increased by 14 per cent in recent years, that community nursing investment and reablement programmes were reducing hospital admissions, and that delayed transfers of care are falling. She said the development of the Royal Alex would help take pressure off Glan Clwyd.
She did not apologise and did not commit to declaring a health emergency.
Pressed further, Mr Millar said the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, the Royal College of Nursing and the British Medical Association have all called for a significant surge in bed numbers to restore safety and dignity in care.
The First Minister pointed to seven consecutive months of falling NHS waiting lists. “Every day I worry about people who have been failed by the NHS in Wales,” she said.
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