Join the dots: Privatisation=bed cuts=corridor medicine

A survey of nurses has revealed what a lot of NHS workers and patients already knew, that patients are routinely being treated and housed in storage areas, offices, TV rooms and outpatient clinics.

This comes on the back of news that massive cuts in the London NHS could well result in the loss of 5,600 beds, this is almost a third of the total number of beds available in the capital.

Bed numbers go down and down thanks to PFI schemes and the internal market's forced cuts, targets forced patients to be shunted out of AE quicker and quicker, it's really no wonder that patients are spilling over into TV rooms and storage areas.

It's all so predictable and it was all so very preventable. The internal market and the government's program of enforced privatisation has left us with this disastrous legacy of patients dying in corridors, at least the private providers are making their healthy profits come what may.