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A grandmother with leukaemia and kidney failure was left on a stretcher for 30 hours in A&E in one of the most harrowing examples of the crisis in the NHS.
The 90-year-old, who wants to stay anonymous, split her head open after a fall in sheltered accommodation and was taken to hospital in an ambulance.
But when she arrived at Whiston Hospital, near Liverpool, the bloodied pensioner was told there were no beds for her.
She turned up at the A&E in the evening of Saturday, April 23, and wasn’t admitted until the early hours of Monday — 30 hours later.
Only then did doctors finally take her into a side room for a scan to check the extent of the damage.
She was forced to wait another 10 hours in a corridor until she was finally given a bed in a ward.
A grandmother, who wished to remain anonymous and was three weeks from her 90th birthday, was stuck on a stretcher in Whiston Hospital, near Liverpool, for 30 hours
Doctors needed to give her a scan to check the extent of the damage but she had to stay on the stretcher for more than a day — which she fell off of on the first night
Recalling her mother’s ordeal, the patient’s daughter said she had fallen out of her bed in the night.
She said: ‘I went straight there, with pyjamas, incontinence pads, a blanket and food and drinks, to try and get an update.’
By the time her daughter had arrived at hospital, the grandmother had barely moved from where she’d been left.
She added: ‘By this point mum was really confused, she thought nurses were carers who come to her bungalow and she kept asking one of them to go and her some sweeteners for her tea out of the cupboard in the kitchen.’
Explaining the distressing wait, her daughter said: ‘We were in a corridor with lots of other people on stretchers — mainly elderly people.
‘I went off down a corridor into another department to find a chair as I have got health issues myself and really needed to sit down.
‘In front of us was another elderly patient, the ambulance staff with that person offered to stay with mum so the crew with mum could leave — we had been there almost an hour at that point.’
She was asked to leave after four hours because the casualty unit didn’t have any space to accommodate family members.
The woman’s daughter said: ‘We tried ringing later on and couldn’t get an answer from A&E — it was just ringing out — understandably they were extremely busy.
‘Later in the evening my son managed to get through and they said his grandmother was in “stretcher triage” but was comfortable, and her head injury was waiting to be assessed by a specialist.
‘The following morning we rang again and my son was told she was still in stretcher triage but had fallen off the trolley in the night.’
A healthcare assistant at the hospital revealed her mother had got her legs stuck through the trolley rails in the night and had fallen. She said: ‘Thank God she hadn’t done herself further injury.’
The woman was eventually admitted and reached a ward in the early hours of the Monday morning, nearly 40 hours after she first arrived.
Her daughter said: ‘She was clearly confused, both through age related memory and hearing loss and probably also as result of the head injury.
‘The hospital is clearly very understaffed and demand is through the roof but leaving a vulnerable old woman for so long in a corridor is totally unacceptable.
‘She wasn’t the only old person I saw in that corridor either, some in a worse state of confusion than mum. It’s like they are disposable, they have no dignity and this system has become the norm.
She added: ‘The staff are maybe hardened to it, maybe they have to be to be able to actually go to work each day.
‘What happens to old people who have no family nearby, to come and advocate or care for them during their wait to be admitted. It is truly shocking and it looks like it’s only going to get worse.’
Her grandmother stayed on the ward for another three weeks, before being discharged to a care home where she is currently staying.
A spokesperson for St Helens and Knowsley NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, said: ‘At times of great pressure, when demand exceeds the number of beds available to admit patients to the hospital, it is regrettable that there may be occasions where patients are cared for in stretcher triage for longer periods of time than we would wish.
‘This was unfortunately the case in April and demand was exceptionally high.
‘As with all other hospitals across the country, we have experienced a significant increase in demand for services over the last three years.
‘Whiston Hospital remains the busiest A&E, with the highest number of attendances in Cheshire and Merseyside.’
They added: ‘Patient safety is always our priority. At all times we ensure that nursing and medical staff maintain the highest levels of care during this unprecedented level of activity.
‘Our staff are responding to this increased pressure with exceptional professionalism and are working incredibly hard throughout the hospital to manage this demand.’
Her traumatic experience is the latest in a long line of excruciating A&E waits in England, with more than 19,000 patients attending casualty forced to wait at least 12 hours for a bed last month.
Pictured: Whiston Hospital in Merseyside
Data on A&E performance in May shows a 19,053 people were forced to wait 12 hours or more to be treated, three times longer than the NHS target. The figure is a fifth lower than last month. Less than three-quarters of patients were seen within the four-hour target of arriving at emergency departments, a slight recovery from last month but the third-lowest rate ever recorded
This was down by a fifth on the previous month — but emergency medics say NHS England statistics are a ‘gross under-representation’ of the actual crisis.
Campaign groups, MPs and senior medics say desperate patients are turning to emergency and walk-in services because they can’t get an appointment with their GP.
Staff shortages and the knock-on effects of the social care crisis and Covid-fuelled backlog are the other factors blamed for the pressures being felt in emergency care.
Many of the 10,000 bed-blockers within the NHS are elderly patients who cannot go back to their homes because extra support is not available or there are no nursing home places. It can cause overcrowding in casualty because the lack of space means patients cannot be moved onto wards.
The Government has, meanwhile, promised to make clearing the waits a priority, which doctors claim means the NHS’ finite amount of beds are taken up by patients having operations.
