The stark reason a man lay on a trolley outside the Senedd on a cold November day

Mental health patients needing admission to hospital in Wales are left waiting days for days and nights on chairs in accident and emergency departments. An experienced mental health nurse has detailed the scenes in overcrowded hospitals as staff ring around to find private beds in places as far away as Manchester and London.

Chloe Webber was speaking as the RCN in Wales launched a protest about long waits in A&E outside the Senedd. She said the shortage of mental health beds and staff has got worse during her nine years in the job.

“It’s painful as a nurse that you can’t provide the care and treatment you want to. Some patients wait 10 hours before they see a mental health nurse then another 24 hours, or more, for a mental health bed, if they need admitting - that would be 24 hours on a chair, that happens every day in Wales.”

The nurse said staff will first try and find a bed in the hospital they are in, then other areas, health boards across Wales and England and eventually private beds - for which the NHS pays. Mental health beds as well as community nurses have been cut in the last decade, adding to the problem. For the latest health and Covid news sign up to our newsletter here.

“There is always a waiting list for mental health emergency beds in Wales. Two of the big health boards only have 10 emergency admission mental health beds when there used to be double that.

“We can be sending people from south to north Wales for a bed or to England. If there is nothing in the NHS we go to the private sector where beds could be anywhere in Britain - I have known people go to Manchester, London and Bristol.

“We try to repatriate these patients if a bed comes up, but it’s a revolving door. It has got worse as they have cut beds, staff and budgets.”

She believes the pressure is less to do with growing mental health problems and more with cuts to community nursing and beds. As case loads for the reduced community nursing service grows some patients don’t get the care they need and end up in A&E departments.

“Growing mental health problems is a small part of it. It is more a lack of capacity than a rise in mental health problems.” The “lack of dignity and privacy” for mental health patients as they sit in A&E and the long waits on chairs overnight and for days also makes many become even sicker and loads ever more pressure on the system.

“We are having to speak to patients sitting on chairs and in corridors. There is no privacy and no dignity and we can’t provide the care we want to,” Chloe said.

"We need more community mental health services to treat people before they get to the point they need to go to A&E.” Chloe, who did not want to identify the hospital she works in, was on the steps of the Senedd with the Royal College of Nursing as it highlighted the long waits some patients are enduring in over crowded hospitals. They mocked up a patient on a trolley in an attempt to get the attention of Ms’s.

While some of the problem is about cash, Chloe was clear that she believes it is also about where budgets are spent. She thinks more needs to be channelled into community nursing to help lessen crises among mental health patients worsening and ending up in Wales' over crowded A&Es..

A Welsh Government spokesperson said: “We do not support people being routinely treated in non-clinical or inappropriate settings, or incidences where people’s quality of care, privacy or dignity is compromised. However, we do recognise the intense pressure sometimes experienced by the NHS in Wales, which can result in people having long stays in emergency departments or assessment spaces”