‘I find it incredibly difficult.It is heartbreaking at times’

At the height of the NHS winter crisis, Rachel Clun speaks with the staff at a crowded emergency department in east London that is currently running at double its usual capacity

- Rachel Clun

Trollies hem the corridor and surround the central nursing hub in the acute centre of Newham Hospital's emergency department, lined up end-to-end in the humming ward. Most are occupied: some patients are too ill to sit up, while others are monitored by security. Doctors and nurses are assessing patients as other staff and family members try to squeeze past in the crowded space.

Bright fluorescent lights beam down and dozens of monitors make incessant noise over the chatter of patients, families and hospital workers, with no privacy to speak of. This is the reality of England’s NHS in winter, with a record 96 per cent of hospital beds currently full.

When we visit, Newham Hospital has just declared it is at Operational Pressures Escalation Level (OPEL) 4 – the highest alert level for a hospital, where rising pressure means the local service is unable to provide comprehensive care. Anna Morgan, a consultant in emergency medicine and the clinical lead, says corridor care is an unavoidable necessity in an under-pressure department running at double its capacity.

“It is a very crowded, very busy department at the moment, for today and the last few days,” she tells The Independent. “This department was originally built with the idea of having about 250 patients, is what we’re told. And we quite regularly now get over 500 a day... so that is a challenge.”

Gemma Davies, the deputy associate director of nursing in urgent and emergency care, says private areas to carry out personal care or confidential conversations with patients are “at a premium”.

“So all the things that we would normally do in quite a controlled space, and having monitoring equipment, then becomes almost like ‘Move this to there, move that to there, move that’, and it’s almost like playing nursing Jenga with patients,” she says.