Care in corridors, toilets and cupboards: nurses’ harrowing stories

More than 5,000 nurses share powerful testimonies, some describing delivering care in corridors, toilets and storage cupboards as 'exhausting and soul-destroying'

Nurses are able to book ‘corridor shifts’ on bank and have described harrowing experiences delivering patient care in toilets, storage cupboards and even hospital car parks on a daily basis.
More than 5,000 nurses shared powerful testimonies on the state of the NHS in a damning report by the RCN, published on 16 January, describing corridor care as ‘exhausting and soul-destroying’.
Nurses booked on bank shifts purely to take care of corridor patients
One nurse in north west England said: ‘Our trust has a permanent corridor care in A&E, you can even book corridor shifts on bank.’
A London nurse added: ‘[Corridor care is] now a regular occurrence in A&E. The allocation has corridor nurses on it now so you’re assigned purely to take care of corridor patients, sometimes 30-plus patients who are having to be changed with dividers around their trolley.’
Demoralised nursing staff reported caring for up to 40 patients in one corridor, being unable to access life-saving equipment such as oxygen and cardiac monitors, and giving intravenous drugs in waiting rooms.
‘Seeing that lady frightened and subjected to animal-like conditions is what broke me. I will not work where this is a normal day-to-day occurrence’
Corridor where some nurses provided care was classed as a 'temporary escalation space'
A nurse working in south England said she handed in her notice after a particularly gruelling shift, where a 90-year-old woman with dementia had wet herself after asking to be taken to the toilet several times.
‘Seeing that lady frightened and subjected to animal-like conditions is what broke me. I will not work where this is a normal day-to-day occurrence,’ the nurse added.
Some 25% of nurses surveyed said they were not told that the corridor they were providing care in was classed as a ‘temporary escalation space’, with the RCN warning this meant risk protocols and additional measures to ease pressures might be missing from these spaces.
Nicola Ranger says testimonies are ‘devastating’ and calls on government to invest more in nursing
Some 5,408 nurses were surveyed across the UK from 18 December 2024 to 11 January 2025.
In an emergency briefing by the RCN on 15 January, general secretary Nicola Ranger described the testimonies as ‘devastating’, saying the government needed to assess the scale of the problem and invest more into nursing.
She called on the government to invest in community care infrastructure to discharge more people from hospital settings safely, and address ‘structural challenges’ in the profession.
She also renewed calls for the government to publish data on care delivered in temporary spaces, after the RCN wrote a letter to health and social care secretary Wes Streeting on 10 January backed by 14 organisations asking for more transparency into the ‘true extent’ of corridor care.
Front-line nurses say work they are doing is ‘not nursing, it’s firefighting’
Three front-line nurses, including an emergency nurse, senior nurse and senior support worker, also spoke at the briefing on 15 January about their experiences on condition of anonymity, saying the work they were doing was ‘not nursing, it’s firefighting’.
The emergency nurse highlighted violence she had faced from patients due to ongoing pressures on emergency departments. ‘I’ve been spat at, I’ve been threatened with an acid attack. I’ve had staff assaulted and throttled in our waiting room, and threatened with weapons,’ she said.
Meanwhile, the senior support worker said corridor care should be called ‘dump and run’ and ‘any space care’.
Addressing a recent job advert for a bank shift ‘corridor nurse’ vacancy at a London trust, the senior nurse said: ‘It has been normalised for a while, but by making it a formal job role, we are more accepting that it is a thing when, quite frankly, it shouldn’t be.’
In an oral statement on 15 January, Mr Streeting said he could not promise that there would not be patients treated in corridors next winter, but it was the government’s ambition to do so.
He said: ‘I want to be clear, I will never accept or tolerate patients being treated in corridors.
'It is unsafe, undignified, a cruel consequence of 14 years of failure on the NHS and I am determined to consign it to the history books.’
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