Why a schoolchild could tell us what’s going wrong with the NHS

Here’s a GCse maths question: it costs £380 a day to keep 86-year-old Mavis, who has dementia but isn’t ill, in hospital. How much could the NHs save by sending her home with a round-the-clock carer earning £10 an hour?

For a bonus mark: if there are 20 people crammed on to trolleys in the waiting room, desperate for a bed, what percentage of them will be thoroughly hacked off that Mavis has been stuck in a hospital bed for several months?

Any bright schoolchild could answer that. It’s just a pity that schoolchildren aren’t running the health service, instead of the brigades of administrators and managers we saw on Hospital (BBC2), filmed at Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham during the recent bitter weather.

some of the chaotic footage resembled video smuggled out of a battle zone. Wise- cracking army medics Hawkeye Pierce and Hot Lips Houlihan, from Korean War sitcom M*A*s*H, would have felt right at home.

As the temperature dropped, patients were backed up on gurneys from the reception desk to the front door. People were crouched and curled on temporary beds that looked no bigger than

CHEAPSKATE OF THE NIGHT: Travel guru Amar Latif, trying to haggle for a better rate on a five-star hotel room in Bath on Thrifty Ways To Summer Holiday (C4), offered to do the washingup and cleaning. Doesn’t sound like much of a holiday to me.

tea trolleys. It was as packed as the M5 on a bank holiday.

Like two dozen other hospitals across the country that week, Queen’s was on Black Alert — an emergency status that signified no spare beds and at least 20 people waiting to be admitted. One bemused doctor, an old hand, gazed around the gridlocked waiting room and remarked that just ten or 15 years ago, the foyer was sometimes so empty that bored staff played indoor cricket there.

Meanwhile, in the operating theatre, a surgeon was mooching around with nothing to do all day because, with no beds for his patients, all his ops had been cancelled. ‘Completely weird,’ he murmured.

Anyone can see this is madness. The simple fact that senior staff are called Advanced Clinical Practitioners instead of ‘doctors’ tells you the NHs is paralysed by the sheer weight of its admin and jargon.

This documentary series doesn’t offer any analysis. Whenever the need for answers became too pressing, the cameras switched to the moving story of a brave 12-year-old named Keilan, facing a spine op for scoliosis. The pictures alone spoke volumes, though.

And it was the pictures, gleaned from ancient newsreels and cine cameras, that made The Queen: Her Commonwealth Story (BBC1) so absorbing.

Presenter George Alagiah tried to bring a personal spin to his report, as he listed the Commonwealth countries where he had lived or worked. But his efforts to reflect the Queen’s own human touch were crushed by the crusty old colonial politicians and palace bigwigs he met.

The only amusing interviewee was Princess Anne, who sounds more like a terribly posh Louis Armstrong with every year. In a throaty, gravelly grumble, she deplored the way everyone films everything today: ‘You can’t see heads in the crowd, just iPads.’

And of royal walkabouts, she said: ‘How many people enjoy walking into a roomful of people they’ve never met before? Now try a street!’

If only Anne could have her own talkshow. We got just a couple of soundbites more — including an aside in which she labelled her mother ‘an honorary man’ because of the respect she commands from everyone.

Otherwise, this show was carried along by marvellous images of Her Majesty visiting Tonga and waltzing with Ghana’s President Nkrumah at the beginning of her reign. No amount of old bores could detract from that.