Urgent and emergency care at the hospital was rerated requires improvement, however, medical care was upgraded from requires improvement to good following an inspection in January.

Amanda Williams, CQC deputy director of hospitals, secondary and specialist care for the South-East, said: ‘When we inspected urgent and emergency and medical care at Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital, we found serious concerns about the safety and quality of care in the emergency department, alongside some notably positive experiences in medical care.'

Williams said the urgent and emergency care was under ‘serious and sustained pressure' with people being cared for in corridors and inconsistent monitoring of their care.

One person who couldn't be accommodated in the mental health lounge because of capacity and safety concerns who left the department to wait elsewhere needed to be found by police.

In addition, at one point during the inspection, nobody was overseeing the main waiting room.

The CQC said there was a disconnect between frontline staff and senior leaders that needed to be addressed urgently.

Some notably positive experiences were found in medical care, however, with end of life care standing out and good leadership enabling staff the time to spend with people and treat them as individuals.

East Kent Hospitals said it had completed 61 of the 66 actions to improve from the inspections and the CQC had stood down the trust's weekly reporting on its progress. 

Dr Des Holden, acting chief executive for East Kent Hospitals said: ‘We recognise that the care the CQC saw in the emergency department in early January was unacceptable for both patients and staff, and we have made significant changes to the emergency department since then, which we were able to demonstrate at the CQC's later inspection in May.

‘The hospital was under unprecedented levels of demand this winter, and since then our teams have worked incredibly hard to make sure it can safely manage significant pressures in the urgent and emergency care service by strengthening safety oversight, improving staffing and training, expanding virtual ward services, introducing digital nursing records and enhancing escalation processes across the hospital.

‘This year, we have also been working as a whole-hospital team, alongside NHS England, NHS Kent and Medway, and with our partner organisations, to end corridor care in our hospitals. We now rarely care for a patient in a corridor and we are focused on elimination of all waits for patients outside a cubicle or bed space anywhere in the hospital.'