Hospital hands patients 'care pack' and apology letter after they're forced to stay on corridors for days on end

17 April 2025, 08:32 | Updated: 17 April 2025, 13:09

Hospital patients are being given airline-style care packs to help cope with being left on corridors for days at a time, LBC can reveal.

Inside the bag there Is a letter apologising for the lack of ward space.

Sarah, 42, told LBC: “I got given a brown paper bag with a letter in apologising and it had inside a bottle of water, an eye mask - because obviously they can't turn the corridor lights off - ear-plugs to block out the noise, a little toothbrush, a little comb and hygiene products, and I just thought… is this how it is now?”

Sarah had been taken by ambulance to the Countess of Chester Hospital but was left in a corridor with half a dozen patients for two days before discharging herself and getting an Uber home. 

“The corridor had six beds on and it's all labelled,” she said.

Read more: NHS pledges to ‘protect data’ as researchers in China access UK study data

Read more: Plan to divert millions of patients from waiting lists with GP service expansion

“On the wall is like a little section where the bed goes and that's it, and you've got call-bells now. At the bottom of that corridor you have a little station with a desk, and it has two nurses on there. It's up to them to then deal with everybody in that corridor and you can see their frustration as well.

“In the bag you also got a little toothbrush, a little comb and hygiene products, I got given earplugs because of the noise. You could hear people screaming, shouting, fights happening in A&E, in the reception, police coming past, and then you've got complete strangers just staring because where else are they meant to look? You've got no privacy whatsoever. Your dignity is totally gone.”

Fighting back tears, Sarah told LBC: “It’s not right. I was being sick, I had a lady next to me who was there with her daughter who was helping me because I was being sick off the medication and I'm lying in a corridor, and there's a lady behind me with dementia and her poor daughter was just completely...you know, didn't even know what to do.

"It’s completely wrong. My medical conditions are private, as are everybody else's, and you're entitled to that privacy and to have them conversations in a dignified, private way. And you just can't.”

Having chosen to go home and self-medicate, Sarah told LBC she wants government ministers to come and see the reality of what is going on in hospitals, and the impact of having to wait months for treatment.

She said: “They need to get out there and they need to look at what the hospitals are going through and what people are going through because what else do I do?

"You're impacting my whole life. You're impacting my work. I can't take weeks off work every week. I love my job. I love being out and about.

"What are the alternatives? Give us some antidepressants. I'm not depressed. What's depressing me is this situation that I can't get the treatment that I need, so now I'm just thinking, right, OK, well, I'll go and get a hysterectomy. And that's the decision I've made.

"After that hospital experience I thought I can't I can't go through this again, so I've asked for this and now I've got to wait again for another appointment to be seen and then I've got to write down all my experiences and put forward a case of why I want a hysterectomy because I'm not going through this again every month."

Health Minister Karin Smyth told LBC's Nick Ferrari at Breakfast: "We're very clear that corridor care is unacceptable. It's again, a legacy that we've inherited.

"Corridor care has become normalised. We want to see the end of that. It's not fair to patients, it's not fair to staff, coming in to see those wards.

"It sounds to me that people are trying to be kind and nice to people that are on those trolleys and trying to bring them a bit of privacy and a bit of time whilst they're waiting.

"For them, being kind is a good thing. But again, we don't want to normalise that care, we want to end that care and that's what we're doing, along with reducing these waiting lists.

"That urgent emergency care is also a key part of the work that I'm doing with Wes Streeting in the Department of Health. We can't have this care normalised in our system."

A Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust spokesperson said: "Our staff are working hard through unprecedented demand for A&E services to see and treat patients quickly based on the urgency of their needs.

"Regrettably, this means some people will have a long wait in a busy environment, which is not the experience they have a right to expect, and for this we are wholeheartedly sorry. 

"Anyone who has a concern about their care is encouraged to contact our Patient Advice and Liaison team."