Overcrowding and Corridor Care in A&E “Killing Around 550 Patients in the UK Every Week”, Study Reveals

Overcrowding and corridor care in A&E may be killing around 550 patients in the UK every week, a damning study has revealed. The Mail has the story.

The scale of the problem is an “absolute scandal” with the fatalities the equivalent of a “fatal jumbo jet crash every single week”, doctors said.

The review of more than 19,000 patients in NHS hospitals found the chance of dying in the following 28 days rose by 1% for every 10% increase in emergency department occupancy.

Alarmingly, the 134 A&Es involved in the study had an average occupancy rate of 175%, meaning they contained almost twice as many patients as they were designed to hold.

The Royal College of Nursing has previously warned that a shortage of A&E beds means patients are often left languishing on trolleys in corridors without proper access to oxygen and other emergency equipment, while staff become more stretched and can easily miss critical signs of deterioration.

Dr Ryan McHenry, an emergency medicine doctor in the west of Scotland and researcher at the University of Glasgow, analysed data from around 70% of the A&Es in England, Wales and Northern Ireland over a two-week period.

He said: “We found that increased crowding in emergency departments is associated with increased mortality for patients admitted to hospital.

“This is important because we know that emergency departments are now often very crowded, and reducing that crowding has the real potential to save lives.”

He estimated around 550 deaths every week may be caused by this overcrowding but said the relatively small size of his study – presented at the European Emergency Medicine Congress in France – meant the range could be anywhere from 33 to 1,083 excess deaths.

For the research, occupancy was calculated by how many spaces, such as cubicles, the A&E department had compared with how many patients were being treated.

Dr McHenry and his colleagues also looked at the impact of ‘corridor care’ where patients receive treatment in non-standard clinical spaces such as corridors.

This was also linked to an increase in the risk of deaths at a similar rate as overcrowding, although the team said occupancy rate was much easier to measure and record.

Official NHS figures show an average of more than 3,000 patients were treated in corridors or other makeshift areas every day in England in July alone.

Worth reading in full.