NHS nurses now routinely ‘avoid eye contact with patients’ because they are ’embarrassed’ about poor standard of care, report reveals

NHS staff in A&E departments are avoiding eye contact with patients because they are ’embarrassed’ by the substandard care patients are receiving, MPs heard today.

The Health and Social Care Committee heard the claim today as senior clinicians warned of a worsening crisis in emergency departments.

Demand for treatment has become so intense that some patients are being treated in corridors – with reports of dying people left parked outside toilets or beside nurses’ stations.

One senior doctor was reported to have said: ‘I don’t think I can go back and do another shift, because I am embarrassed at the care we are delivering.’

The comment was included in a dossier of evidence submitted to MPs by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), highlighting the scale of pressure facing A&E departments.

The committee also heard that a vast majority of emergency medicine clinical leaders say overcrowding has become a daily occurrence. More than half of the 80 consultants surveyed from emergency departments across England said their unit was unsafe for both patients and staff.

Presenting evidence to MPs, Dr Ian Higginson, president of the RCEM, said: ‘Emergency departments have become the safety valve rather than the safety net.

‘Our staff feel that they’re left to fend for themselves, with poor engagement throughout the system, and they feel disillusioned because it has been going on for so long with little mitigation.

Echoing his concerns, Professor Nicola Ranger, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, told the committee her organisation had collected more than 5,000 ‘harrowing’ testimonies from nurses over Christmas and New Year.

‘The thing that worries me most is that they are losing hope,’ she said.

‘I think there is a sense of embarrassment. Our staff are genuinely trying but I was speaking to a patient last week who said they felt staff couldn’t even look them in the eye.

‘Those are symptoms of staff who are head-down because they feel upset and ashamed.

‘And when patients are struggling to get a nurse to give them eye contact, that is not a good place to be in when nursing is a profession of safety and vigilance and care.

‘This is an emergency, we cannot get to the place where people don’t feel proud of what they’re doing.’

Healthcare professionals across the system are experiencing ‘a lot of negative emotions around shame, guilt and anger’, Dr Rosy Benneyworth told MPs, warning that corridor care is spreading beyond emergency departments.

She said the situation is approaching a ‘national emergency’.

Around 16,600 people a year in England die as a direct result of delays in accessing A&E care or getting a bed on a ward, according to estimates from the RCEM.

There are also concerns that official figures may not capture the full scale of the problem, as patients left waiting in ambulances often fall outside corridor care statistics.

Prof Ranger said hospitals can also manipulate performance figures by moving patients around the system.

‘I’ve been to a hospital where they were telling me the 45 minute handover delay ambulance was brilliant,’ she said.

‘What they didn’t tell me was there were five extra patients stuck on the ward in order to achieve that. You can play all of the system off each other, which is why it will come down to culture.

‘The data can be played off to say whatever you want, but we’ve got to make this about people and patients, and that requires culture and leadership.’