Improving care for patients in the outlying wards: Lessons from patients' care experience.

Importance: Overcrowding in hospitals and lack of capacity in general medical wards can result in a medical patient being transferred to other specialty wards often referred as 'outlying' or 'boarding' wards.

Objectives: We explored the experiences of our outlying patients to identify local factors that affect their care experience and inform interventions that could improve their care deliveries and outcomes.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Qualitative interviews using semi-structured questions were conducted in 21 medical patients from a mixture of specialty wards in a large tertiary NHS hospital.