District nurse investment needed to ‘turn around’ corridor care, says RCN chief

The government has unveiled plans to introduce specialist teams into hospitals and launch new urgent care services across the UK to help tackle corridor care.

But while the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has in part welcomed the move, it stressed that eradicating corridor care requires ‘looking at the bigger picture’ – including district nursing and social care.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has announced there will be specialist teams working with NHS Trusts to help meet the government target of ending corridor care by the end of this parliament.

The specialist teams have been dubbed the Getting it Right First Time (GIRFT) teams and will be deployed in hospitals with the aim of providing clinical support to leadership staff, such as helping to identify how to improve discharge and flow.

To further tackle pressures in busy hospital departments, the government has also confirmed the locations for 40 new and expanded urgent care sites across England.

The programme, backed by £215.5m includes 10 new urgent treatment centres (UTCs), four expanded UTCs, five new same day emergency care (SDEC) services and 21 expanded SDECs, providing a significant increase in frontline capacity.

It is hoped that these will help ease pressure on A&E departments by ensuring more patients are treated in the right setting.

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RCN chief executive and general secretary Professor Nicola Ranger said the plans are ‘positive’ but reinforced that eradicating corridor care requires ‘looking at the bigger picture’.

She has issued a fresh call for investment in district nursing to ‘keep people healthy at home and speed up discharge’.

She said: ‘It’s positive to see new detail and funding attached to corridor care plans in England.

‘This wouldn’t have been possible without the brave testimony of nursing staff who lifted the lid on the national scandal of collapsing care standards.’

Thousands of nurses recently provided ‘devastating testimonies’ about corridor care to the RCN in a recent survey of more than 5,000 nursing staff.

It revealed almost seven in 10 nurses (66.81%) were providing care in overcrowded or unsuitable places on a daily basis.

Nurses described the situation as ‘exhausting and soul destroying’ and that caring in these environments ‘makes you feel like you failed as nurse’.

‘Action to support trusts where corridor care is particularly challenging is encouraging, but we know from our members that the problem is ongoing and widespread,’ added Professor Ranger.

‘That’s why we need a plan to ease pressures everywhere, not just in those struggling the most.

‘Corridor care happening anywhere is unacceptable, undignified and a risk to patient safety. There must never be a repeat of the desperate scenes last winter.

‘Alongside new emergency and urgent care capacity, properly eradicating corridor care requires ministers to look at the bigger picture.

‘“Getting it right first time” means delivering new investment to increase capacity in community NHS services, such as district nursing, and social care to keep people healthy at home and speed up discharge.

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‘That’s how you ease pressures on hospitals and turn things round.’

Professor Ranger recently told a meeting of the health and social care committee the government must put greater ‘energy and focus’ into care delivered outside of hospital settings to help eliminate corridor care.

Health and social care secretary Wes Streeting said: ‘For too long, the normalisation of corridor care has been baked into our NHS – it’s unacceptable, undignified and exactly why this government is shifting the dial for patients and staff.

‘We’re sending in specialist teams of experts to identify the causes in some of the worst offending trusts and swiftly rectify the problems they find.

‘That, plus new and expanded urgent care centres will mean patients are treated more quickly and in the right place, while easing pressure on busy A&Es to care for the most serious cases.

‘We are cutting waiting times and moving away from unacceptable corridor care, building an NHS that treats patients with dignity.

‘After the NHS performed significantly better this winter, we are going further to strengthen services and build a system fit for the future, backed by record investment.’

Calls for better investment in district nursing to help end corridor care have been made to the government in Wales previously, with the RCN Wales and British Medical Association (BMA) Cymru Wales producing a petition last year.

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It called on the Welsh Government and NHS Trusts to take four urgent actions to end corridor care in Wales – including increasing the number of district nurses and boost general practice funding.

A new definition of corridor care has recently been established by NHS England (NHSE) to help collect and analyse data on the scale of the situation across the country.

The definition states that for general and acute beds, corridor care relates to the number of patients who are receiving care for more than 45 minutes on a ward outside of a bed space.

Professor Ranger said the new definition is by ‘no means perfect’ but will help determine the ‘scale of the crisis’.