Nurses casually stepped over a patient as he lay dying on a  hospital floor.

Peter Thompson, 41, was left in a corridor for ten hours before someone noticed he had passed away.

In a final act of indignity, hospital auxiliaries pulled his lifeless body across the floor in a manner his family described as like ‘dragging a dead animal’.

The scenes which shame the NHS were all captured on CCTV. Staff thought Mr Thompson was merely drunk and left him to ‘sleep it off’.

Yesterday a coroner condemned the death as ‘wholly preventable’.

An inquest heard that the father-of-one, who had consumed a cocktail of drink and drugs, could have been saved had he received emergency treatment.  

The hospital’s accident and emergency department was just 200 yards away.