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WITH metal poles erected to prop up “death trap” corridor ceilings, staff are taking desperate measures to stop the roof quite literally caving in at the UK’s ‘worst hospital’.
Tales of 12-hour waits at A&E and pencil-pushing executives sitting on huge salaries paint a sorry picture of a struggling institution where hard-working doctors and nurses do their best to serve thousands of local residents.
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This week, the Government published an official league table rating every NHS hospital in England from best to worst.
The damning rankings show just 27 out of 134 make it into the best-performing tier one or two, with the remaining 107 falling into tier three or four, meaning they are the “most challenged”.
Propping up the bottom of the new scoring system, which was ordered by Health Secretary Wes Streeting, is Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King’s Lynn, Norfolk.
Rating hospitals on areas including waiting lists, how long patients are in emergency departments and staff feedback, the new league table has proved divisive, with NHS chiefs branding it simplistic and demoralising.
Many proud residents of King’s Lynn agree, saying that the majority of Queen Elizabeth staff are doing the best they can with the little funding they get.
Instead, locals and former workers at the hospital – named after The Queen Mother – point the finger at highly-paid bureaucrats tying up medical workers in needless red tape and a historic lack of government investment.
This, they say, is most evident in the state of the “croaky” old buildings with no air conditioning, but also in the understaffed A&E department, where people wait “for hours on end for not great care”.
Retired salesman Dave Nice, 66, tells The Sun: “The issues with our hospital are down to mismanagement, but mainly the lack of funding from previous governments and the current one.
“The people making decisions about NHS funding barely use the system – they all have private health care.
“It seems to me like they don’t care.
“So what can people do? The staff at the hospital really care, they’re amazing, but they’re hamstrung by the funding they get.
“Telling them that they’re the worst hospital in the country is disgusting, it’s demoralising and shouldn’t have been done.”
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The King’s Lynn Queen Elizabeth hospital opened in 1980 and serves around 250,000 residents over a 1,500km squared area.
In 2023, the Government vowed to push through a rebuild, following warnings that it will become unsafe for use after 2030.
But the project has been delayed, with locals told it might not be complete until 2033, leading to protests earlier this year calling for the estimated £862million works to be done within the timeframe.
Construction on the new hospital is expected to start in 2027, and the Health Secretary has said he will try to get the hospital completed before 2033 if he can.
He has also claimed the rebuild is a priority for his department.
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‘Lying under a death trap’
The works are clearly urgently needed. The Queen Elizabeth has ceilings constructed from reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC).
Unfortunately, RAAC only has a life-span of around 40-50 years before it starts to break down. This has resulted in the hospital having to use 1,500 props to hold up ceilings to keep them structurally safe.
The situation has been described by patients as a “death trap”, with some saying they can hear bubbling and cracking when they’re kept in overnight.
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Former patient Desmond Bilverstone told ITV: “They make a hell of a lot of crackling noises.
“At night time you can hear it and you think what’s going on next? Everything cracks around here.”
Each day, specialists have to check the ceilings for weak spots to ensure everyone is kept safe. When it rains, the ceiling can buckle, and in 2021 an intensive care ward had to be evacuated.
“The words that one of our patients used is that they were lying under a death trap,” Phulmattie Mohan, a hospital matron, said.
‘We don’t have enough staff’
Several medical staff who have spoken to The Sun anonymously blame huge salaries of higher ups for preventing more staff being employed
One said: “The simple issue is, we don’t have enough nursing staff or other medical professional to meet demand.
“Instead, there are too many people higher up doing jobs on large salaries that just aren’t needed. I don’t even know what some of them do.
“The focus used to be on care, but now it’s all about meeting audit requirements or how people wash their hands.
“We need to go back to focusing on medical staff and care, not having people pushing pens round for no apparent reason.”
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The new rankings system has been endorsed by the Health Secretary, who claimed it will identify where “urgent support” was needed, adding: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
He said: “Patients know when local services aren’t up to scratch, and they want to see an end to the postcode lottery.”
Many King’s Lynn resident rankle at the blunt nature of the table’s assessments, but echo the claims that staff after being let down by those in the top jobs.
Taking away all the funding is leaving the NHS crippled across the board
Warren Blackwell
George Armitt, 30, a former health care assistant at the Queen Elizabeth, tells us: “The staff at the hospital are brilliant, but there is little care for them up the chain.
“It’s all been made about getting people in and out of the hospital.
“When I worked there we had a patient with TB and it wasn’t until six months after that the higher ups decided all the staff needed to be tested for it. Which as far as I’m concerned is a bit late.
“It just shows how little regard there is for the people on the ground. I worked on the infectious ward, so there is a risk of catching something, but there should be more care.
“It’s the higher up managers that have no interest in the staff of the patients. They just see everything as numbers, and that’s the problem in my view.”
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George was in town with Jackie, 70, who had just undergone a hip replacement in July at the Queen Elizabeth.
“The hospital have been absolutely brilliant with me the whole way through,” she says.
“I don’t have a bad word to say about them at all. They deserve a medal for working as hard as they do with the conditions they have.”
Funding fight
The hospital has been struggling with funding and last year took 11 per cent of its beds out of use, because it couldn’t afford to use them.
By closing 60 of the 250 beds, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital King’s Lynn NHS Foundation Trust was able to make a saving of £5.5million and claimed the money was being put towards funding care in the community.
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The hospital’s former chief operating officer, Simon Illingworth, was tasked with finding £29.5million of savings in the financial year from 2024 into 2025 – which was the second highest target in the country, according to the Health Service Journal.
The Queen Elizabeth has a history of being documented as struggling, and in 2013 it was classed as consistently failing to meet the national standards of quality and safety by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and placed into the highest risk category.
Department of Health executive body Monitor, which ceased to exist in 2016, placed the hospital into special measures the same year.
It was able to remedy this by 2015, with an inspection concluding there was “marked improvement in the quality of care being delivered”.
The simple issue is, we don’t have enough nursing staff or other medical professional to meet demand
Anonymous nurse
But by 2018 it was placed back into special measures, with concerns particularly over maternity services.
In February 2022 it was taken back out of special measures, with the CQC stating the hospital was “caring, effective and well led”.
These efforts appear to have been appreciated by locals. Jackie Davison, 61, even opts to go to the Queen Elizabeth over the nearby Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital.
“Norwich bungled my dermatology appointments multiple times, but since I’ve moved to the Queen Elizabeth it’s been fantastic,” she says.
“The staff are really friendly, you’re treated like a person, not a number. I’ve never had to wait long for an appointment. I can’t fault them.
“But I know they’re cut to the bone on staff in other areas, and they do their best but it’s hard. You cut the staff, things are going to struggle. They need more funding.”
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Pal Warren Blackwell, 55, added: “The Government just keeping taking from the NHS to give to other places. It needs to stop.
“Taking away all the funding is leaving the NHS crippled across the board. You can’t get into an NHS dentist here in King’s Lynn anymore.
“And I can’t imagine anyone wants to go into work at the hospital after being told they’re the worst in the country. It’s horrible.”
‘A&E horror stories’
While locals are fiercely protective of the hospital’s hard-working staff, the over-stretched A&E department is a particular point of concern for many.
Sue Grey, 58, a retired gardener thinks the problem goes deeper than just a lack of funding.
She said: “When it comes to big treatments the hospital is great but the A&E just stinks. But they’re dumped in a croaky old hospital with no air conditioning, and it’s held up by god knows what for however long it can be.
“When I went into the hospital doing a nursing course 30 years ago, the hospital was fantastic. It was clean, nurses ran it like it was in the Army.
“The conditions now are just awful. I don’t think it’s as clean as it used to be. We should return to how things used to be.
Telling them that they’re the worst hospital in the country is disgusting, it’s demoralising and shouldn’t have been done
Dave Nice, retired salesman
“People couldn’t sit on beds, no one balked at being asked to do something. But that’s not the case anymore. People have got too soft and woke.
“We need to go back to how hospitals used to be run by doctors and nurses. I think that would help out a lot.
“My daughter was treated there for lymphoma, and it was fantastic, and really clean. I wouldn’t send her there now. If I had to go there now, with the building how it is, I’d be traumatised.”
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Former patients cite up to 12-hour waits to see A&E doctors, with Dave Williams, 46, explaining he was “waiting for ages with dizziness and things”.
Mum Tegan says she was left horrified at the advice an A&E doctor gave her partner after sustaining bad burns.
“It’s not uncommon to hear horror stories about the A&E team with people waiting for hours on end for not great care,” she says.
“My partner went there when he had burns on his face from a pan fire, and they told him to just put Vaseline on it.
“It was a bad burn and that didn’t seem right, so we drove up to the hospital in Norwich where he was seen quickly and they removed the burnt skin and properly dressed it.
“I dread to think what might have happened if we’d just followed the advice of the doctor in King’s Lynn.”
The staff at the hospital are brilliant, but there is little care for them up the chain
George Armitt, former hospital worker
Despite the horrid experience with A&E, Tegan says having her child at the maternity unit was great.
“I had to have an emergency C-section but the staff were great and there were no issues,” she says.
Her biggest concern is how over-worked the staff are.
She said: “The demand on Queen Elizabeth is really unfair. They’re handling patients from a huge area.
“Everyone I know who works there are exhausted and overworked, but they’re doing their best.
“If they had more staff, then I think things would be better across the board.”
The Queen Elizabeth Hospital King’s Lynn NHS Foundation Trust declined to comment when contacted by The Sun.
In a statement responding to the rankings table, Chris Bown, interim executive managing director of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, said: “Our patients deserve the highest standards of care, and we are sorry that in some of our performance areas, as reported in the National Oversight Framework data, we have fallen short.
“Immediate steps are being taken to address the issues. We are working closely within our newly formed Norfolk and Waveney University Hospitals Group, as well as with NHS England and regulators to deliver urgent improvements.
“We recognise and take very seriously any concerns raised about The Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
“Our staff work tirelessly under very challenging circumstances, and we are committed to supporting them as we make the necessary changes.”
TIMELINE OF THE NHS WAITING LIST
THE NHS waiting list in England has become a political flashpoint as it has ballooned in recent years, more than doubling in a decade.
The statistics for England count the number of procedures, such as operations and non-surgical treatments, that are due to patients.
The procedures are known as elective treatment because they are planned and not emergencies. Many are routine ops such as for hip or knee replacements, cataracts or kidney stones, but the numbers also include some cancer treatments.
This is how the wait list has changed over time:
August 2007: 4.19million – The first entry in current records.
December 2009: 2.32million – The smallest waiting list on modern record.
April 2013: 2.75million – The Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition restructures the NHS. Current chancellor Jeremy Hunt was Health Secretary.
April 2016: 3.79million – Junior doctors go on strike for the first time in 40 years. Theresa May is elected Prime Minister.
February 2020: 4.57million – The final month before the UK’s first Covid lockdown in March 2020.
July 2021: 5.61million – The end of all legal Covid restrictions in the UK.
January 2023: 7.21million – New Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledges to reduce waiting lists within a year, effectively April 2024.
September 2023: 7.77million – The highest figure on record comes during a year hit with strikes by junior doctors, consultants, nurses and ambulance workers.
February 2024: 7.54million – Ministers admit the pledge to cut the backlog has failed.
August 2024: 7.64million – List continues to rise under Keir Starmer’s new Labour Government.
September 2024: 7.57million – A one per cent decline is the first fall since February and a glimmer of hope.
December 2024: 7.46million – The list has fallen for four consecutive months.
January 2025: 7.43m – Still falling but slowly, likely due to added strain on emergency services and more cancellations due to illness over winter.
May 2025: 7.36m – The lowest for two years, since 7.33m in March 2023.
June 2025: 7.37m – Increased again, but only by about 10,000. Health bosses played it down and said it increases every June.
