The hospital that is infested by pigeons and leaving some patients 'traumatised'

'The tunnels were wet, flooded in places and there was bird faeces everywhere' - how one patient described conditions inside Wales' biggest hospital. Investigations editor Conor Gogarty reports

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A 77-YEAR-OLD emphysema patient shivering after a heating failure; an 80-year-old in his final hours, wet from the dripping ceiling of a pigeon-infested tunnel; and a despairing staff member who says working at Wales' biggest hospital has become "an absolute nightmare".

These are some of the alarming descriptions of Cardiff's University Hospital of Wales that we have heard in the fortnight since we revealed almost 300 consultants had sent bosses a letter stating staff morale was at an "all-time low".

Many of the problems raised in the letter had to do with the dilapidated state of the hospital, which is plagued by sewage leaks and water damage.

After publishing the letter we were contacted by a hospital employee who said: "The place is just full of pigeons nesting in what we call the catacombs, the underground tunnel. On the first floor there are buckets everywhere to catch the water coming through the roof. The whole hospital is an absolute nightmare."

They shared with us pictures of a walkway carpeted with pigeon droppings and a corridor where a "disgusting liquid" was dripping through a collapsed ceiling. It comes after a scathing report on the hospital's operating theatres recently found there had been "several occasions when pigeons were found in trauma theatre or on the theatre corridor".

We also heard from a woman who described her critically ill 80-year-old dad's awful experience in the hospital's tunnels, through which he was transported twice in the days before his death last month from a lung condition.

While critically ill he was pushed in his bed through the "disgusting" tunnels, his daughter said, from an overflow unit to the main hospital building so he could be treated with a higher concentration of oxygen.