The ambulance arrived swiftly, and within an hour of suffering a stroke early on Monday, 66-year-old Pauline Freeman was on a hospital trolley at the Worcestershire Royal hospital.

From then on it went less smoothly. “My wife woke me up at 4.30am and said she couldn’t feel her left side,” said her husband, John. “The ambulance was there in record time and she was on a trolley at the hospital by 5.30am. And there she stayed.”

For 54 hours.



“It was horrendous,” he said. “The nurses did all they could but the place was in meltdown. It was manic. There were at least 20 people on trolleys. It was very difficult to manoeuvre around them. A porter told me they were putting some patients in a decontamination room – basically a big shower room – to cram in more beds. They ran out of pillows and blankets.”

John, from Worcester, said his wife was close to a doorway and was woken every time it opened. At one point she was moved to the plaster room so she could get some peace. He said they struggled to get enough for her to eat. “I went and got her a sandwich and a flask of tea.”

He said he had written to the hospital and his MP to complain. “They should kick the executives out of their offices and put in more beds,” he said. Pauline eventually made it to the stroke ward on Wednesday. Her husband said recovery would be a long process. “What she has gone through will not help.”

The difficult conditions were echoed by others. One woman who was at the hospital on the evening of New Year’s Day said the corridors looked like a war zone.

Another, Sharon Shepherd, said it looked as if the hospital was dealing with a disaster. She had a six-hour wait overnight on Wednesday after her daughter Mollie, 12, injured her foot in a gymnastics session.

“The corridors were lined with patients, with elderly people being treated. The place was rammed and ambulances kept coming,” Shepherd said. “The doctors and nurses were brilliant but they were rushed off their feet. We counted 10 to 12 trolleys on one corridor alone. It was horrendous. It was if there had been a major incident.”

Shepherd said she would have taken Mollie to the minor injuries unit near her home in Tenbury Wells, but it shuts at 9pm. “We had no choice but to go to Worcester.”

Other patients and relatives described their experiences on social media. Sharon Reeves said when she went to A&E with her son they saw elderly patients crying for help on the corridors. Liz Morgan said her mother was in severe pain but could not even get from the ambulance into the building because it was so busy. “I get the nurses are doing what they can but we need another hospital,” she said.

Keith Gormley, 74, has spent many hours waiting in corridors at the Worcestershire Royal. At the end of last year, his wife, Jackie, said he had to wait for 27 hours to be seen. On Thursday it was a more manageable three hours after he had problems with his pacemaker.

Jackie, 72, a retired social worker, said: “We came in at 8am and had a long wait in the corridor to be seen. We were worried it was going to be like the last time we were in hospital on 29 November, when we had to wait 27 hours to be seen. On that occasion we told the staff about his heart problems but he was just left in a corridor.



“Something needs to be done to address the issue because it has been an absolute nightmare.”

Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS trust said the trolleys were not hard metal contraptions but A&E beds on wheels, and insisted patients were treated and monitored while on the trolleys, not left to wait.

It said the corridors in question were within the enclosed emergency department, not general corridors. The level of care was not what it would like to provide, it said, but the alternative would be to turn patients away.

A spokesperson said: “Our focus continues to be on providing safe emergency care, however we do recognise that long waits in our A&E departments can cause distress and for this we apologise. We would reiterate that A&E patients continue to be seen and treated in order of clinical priority.”