PATIENT suffering in struggling A&E departments is “tantamount to torture,” the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) warned today.

The union was responding to a Channel 4 Dispatches undercover investigation which exposed the crisis in emergency care after 14 years of Tory underfunding and neglect of the NHS.

An undercover reporter spent two months working as a trainee healthcare assistant and secretly filming in the emergency department of the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital.