Sick children being treated in cupboards - medics tell of dire state of hospitals

PATIENTS in Wales are dying, diagnoses are missed and outcomes worse because they cannot get hospital beds, the Royal College of Nursing and British Medical Association Cymru Wales warned as they launched a report with a litany of dire cases from across every health board.

- By ABBIE WIGHTWICK

Testimony from doctors and nurses included a patient who died in a hospital waiting room when they should have had a bed, an elderly woman examined in a toilet because it was the only space available and sick children treated in “cupboards”.

Patients are being forced to wait on plastic chairs and trolleys for hours and even days and nights without access to proper monitoring, refreshments or toilets in the “crowded, chaotic atmosphere” in Wales’ hospitals, the report says.

One medic working at a hospital in the Hywel Dda University Health Board area told the report: “A patient was sat in a waiting room, when they should have been on a bed. They collapsed and died in the waiting room. Unfortunately, this is not something that's uncommon!”

In other cases patients made to wait on chairs without access to toilets have urinated themselves while staff struggle to care for people in areas without access to piped oxygen and other monitoring equipment.

Some patients give up and go home without treatment because the wait is so frightening and uncomfortable, doctors and nurses report.

Others have resorted to sleeping on hospital floors while they wait for assessment.

The testimony from the Royal College of Nursing and British Medical Association Cymru Wales is backed up by a recent survey from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine which showed that in the first quarter of 2025, every Accident and Emergency Department in Wales recorded seeing patients in unsafe, inappropriate spaces with almost half of patients waiting for an inpatient bed.

Now the RCN and BMA in Wales have joined forces to address what they describe as “the alarming state of corridor care in Welsh hospitals and healthcare services”.

Yesterday, they launched a joint petition urging the Welsh Government to take immediate action to end the practice of treating patients in corridors, chairs, waiting areas and “all other inappropriate areas”.