John, 42, said he was “quite angry” after spending about 24 hours in a hospital corridor in south-west England, having arrived in A&E on Monday afternoon with chest pain. “It was very clear that the hospital was running beyond capacity.”

At the time of writing, he had moved to a different hospital in the area and was waiting for an angiogram on Wednesday. Messaging from his corridor hospital bed he said: “It’s narrow, cramped and there is zero patient privacy.”

John is one of dozens of people who shared their experiences of the corridors of A&E with the Guardian, after a hospital in north London posted adverts calling for nurses to take on 12-hour “corridor care” shifts.

“The plan was to admit me to a ward but they’re all full,” John said.

“Since arriving I’ve had one hot meal and yesterday I had a cheese sandwich and a packet of crisps for dinner. Not great for someone with a history of cardiac issues and definitely not the Mediterranean diet I’ve been told I should be on.

“It’s obvious that staffing levels are low, patient numbers are high and staff morale is through the floor.”

‘Absolute pandemonium’

Messaging the Guardian from a hospital in south-east England on Tuesday, Michael, who is a civil servant, said his elderly mother spent about 17 hours in a corridor bed. In her 80s and suffering from a chronic condition, she was later admitted to a ward. He said: “There are just too many people to deal with and too little time. There is constant disturbance, not to mention the indignity and struggle of it being a busy place.

“At one point, a rush of people came into the corridor my mother was in and she couldn’t believe what she saw. She said to me: ‘It was terrible – absolute pandemonium.’ These are the realities of A&E that patients are being exposed to.”

He said his concern was mainly for patients who did not have relatives to wait with them. “Staff are juggling so many different things that small things can slip off the agenda.”

‘I felt ashamed, embarrassed and appalled’

Jane, who was accompanied by her son during her visit to A&E last April, said she would have to be “knocked out” to go back after spending 15 hours in a corridor. “Elderly patients with dementia were loudly distressed and immobile patients had to use bedpans in a busy corridor. It was nothing short of horrific.”

The 53-year-old office administrator from north-west England was taken to hospital after calling 999 due to severe pain in her lower back and not being able to move. She later discovered she had a slipped disc pressing into a nerve. “The pain was worse than childbirth and they could only offer me paracetamol. I asked for gas and air but they said there were no staff to monitor me.

“I was constantly being passed and shunted by porters or other patients and their relatives, and my medical notes were on a torn scrap of paper at the end of my trolley. I felt ashamed, embarrassed and appalled at the state I was in.”

After an MRI scan she was given morphine and discharged herself once the pain became manageable. She said she had “ended up with PTSD” due to her experience and believed the main issue was a lack of management. “Patients are suffering avoidable extreme pain and deteriorating significantly in an environment where they are supposed to be helped,” she said.

Healthcare professionals also got in touch with the Guardian about the situation in hospitals. Many felt corridor care had become standard practice and mentioned that staff were just too thinly spread. Others mentioned feeling “ashamed” and “heartbroken” to see people in corridors for long periods of time and that there was clearly something wrong with the system.

‘It’s a better alternative than keeping patients in ambulances’

For 25-year-old Alan, who works as a paramedic in East Anglia, corridor care is a “better alternative” than keeping patients in ambulances outside A&E. He said: “It’s often painted as the worst possible outcome in the media but ambulance staff simply don’t have the knowledge, training or equipment to care for people properly for hours on end outside a hospital.”

He felt there was “no overarching strategy” for how to manage delays at hospitals but that corridor care was “better and safer” and freed up ambulances for those who need them in the community. “You spend your shift not wanting to go to hospital because you know you’ll be there for six to seven hours.

“It’s far from ideal but keeping patients in ambulances is seen as an ‘easy option’ by some [hospital] staff as they perceive patients to receive 1:1 care and constant monitoring. But they forget about the patients in their own homes who might be really unwell and need us to go to them.”

Alan said delays in A&E also affected patients’ decisions about whether they went into hospital or not. “Sometimes they don’t want to wait and say: ‘Why bother?’ But that means they don’t get the care or investigations they need. It’s impossible to know the wider effect this has on people’s health.”

‘I felt complicit’

Paul, a medical consultant who used to work in the west of England, said corridors and assessment rooms full of patients was not a new phenomenon. “It’s bedlam,” he said. “I’ve been in medicine for over 30 years so I know this isn’t how it should be, but junior doctors don’t appreciate just how abnormal it is to have such a large number of patients treated like this.”

He recalled a case where a young man with severe gastroenteritis and terrible diarrhoea was treated in a chair in A&E for five days. “He transformed from a rather unwell man with a gut infection to a grossly sleep-deprived man who was unkempt, a bit crazy, and utterly exhausted. In the end he discharged himself.”

Paul, who no longer works in the NHS but remains in healthcare, said no human should have to go through what he saw. “It wasn’t even the worst case I’d seen but I felt complicit.”

He said the issue could not be solved overnight but that some of the solutions included recruitment and infrastructure. “Some hospitals are just not fit for purpose to cope with the numbers we’re getting and need to be rebuilt. But it takes years just to secure funding.

“You can’t point the finger at anyone in particular as everyone’s just making the best they can of a bad situation.”

*All names have been changed.