Shock testimony of NHS nurse reveals harrowing reality of A&E today - from men dying in wheelchairs to women lying in soiled sheets READ MORE: Half the UK will end up in A&E soon, top doctor warns By ANONYMOUS Published: 20:31 EST, 23 January 2025 | Updated: 20:45 EST, 23 January 2025 e-mail View comments When I had last set eyes on the man who had been brought in with a suspected heart condition, he was wedged in a wheelchair into an alcove normally used to store hospital equipment. He was clearly seriously ill and should have been in a cubicle attached to a monitor – but then you could say the same for the dozens of others, crammed into the corridor outside my hospital’s frantically busy A&E department, the only physical space available left to us. I say ‘space’ – there wasn’t any.
Even the corridor was filled to capacity with patients on trolleys, in wheelchairs and waiting room chairs, along with their relatives and other ‘walking wounded’ patients, all trying to navigate their way to and from the vending machine at the far end. So crammed, that when the man in the wheelchair suffered a cardiac arrest, it was impossible for the crash team to get to him to resuscitate him. There was literally no room to reach him, less still to lie him on the floor and perform CPR, something which has become not uncommon, along with nurses straddling patients on trolleys performing CPR as everyone watches.
That man died right there in his chair as his frantic wife screamed .
