Attendances to Emergency Departments (EDs) have grown over recent years. Many patients are experiencing delays in moving from ED to their acute admission destination.

This quality improvement project explored qualitative aspects to perception of corridor care. It provides a framework for ongoing learning, continuing to put patients at the focus of care, and facilitates the development of good practice for those journeying through busy EDs.

I aimed to reduce levels of state anxiety experienced by patients in our ED corridor, by one metric point as measured across a Likert scale of agreement.

Following trust and governance approval, SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) and stakeholder analyses, 185 service users participated in standardised questionnaire completion over five cycles of a PDSA (plan, do, study, act) model over eight months. Demographic data was collected.

Interventions included; apology and space allocation, named nurse, healthcare assistant round, pain scoring and patient enquiry, curtains for privacy and dignity.

Sequenced interventions mapped patient anxiety measurements pre and post intervention using the well-validated Spielberg state anxiety tool. A Likert scale of agreement (metrically converted: strongly disagree -2 to strongly agree +2) measured patients’ perception of care throughout, based on common themes identified from SWOT analysis.

Overall, metric levels of ‘bad’ anxiety feelings [tense/worried/upset] reduced and ‘good’ anxiety feelings [calm/content/relaxed] increased with progressive intervention sequencing, p=0.0195 (0.000016–0.09928, variance 0.5, t-test).

Although people recognised attempts to manage their anxiety, these attempts did not have significant effects on their overall level of anxiety; p=0.271(0.055–0.496) for ‘good’ anxiety and p=0.25(0.067–0.402) for ‘bad’ anxiety.

Further work is required with larger studies and allowing for multivariate analysis to explore this in the wider ED setting.