With no additional capacity, hospitals have been forced to improvise with their use of space; converting carparks into waiting rooms, skips into surgeries and toilets into executive office space, with unlimited flushing capacity. One NHS manager highlighted the benefits of a corridor: ‘You get lovely through draft and all the strip lighting you could desire. Patients will have choice of reclining on a trolley or on state-of-the-art floor tiles. And if the corridor gets filled up, we can always make use of air vents, cavities between walls and unblock a few drains.
‘Many patients feel isolated, but fortunately corridors provide a fantastic amount of footfall. Even the most jaded individual can’t help but be excited by the constant blur of faces and exposure to new germs.’
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