Operation terror
BBC2, 9pm WHEN London was hit by a terror attack on Westminster Bridge on March 22, the city’s hospitals were called to action.
Five people died and dozens were injured after Khalid Masood drove a car into pedestrians, then stabbed a police officer to death.
Three miles away, a major incident was declared at St Mary’s Hospital – the nearest of London’s four major trauma centres.
The hospital’s site director Lesley Powls says: “We accept that the chances of there being a terrorist incident are higher for us to have to deal with than certain other hospitals.”
The fly-on-the-wall series had extraordinary access to one of the UK’s biggest and busiest NHS trusts, Imperial College Healthcare. In this first episode, staff have just minutes to implement the Trust’s Major Incident Protocol, putting the hospital on lockdown and organising the transfer of some critically ill patients from the already full intensive care unit to sister hospital, Charing Cross.
In A&E, specialist trauma teams are assembled, ready to receive the casualties as they start to arrive.
Victims include students from a French school trip, 18-year-old Yann and 16-year-old Victor, and Englishman Stephen – who needs immediate surgery to save his leg.
In the days after the attack, staff try to revert to business as usual and arrange for the repatriation of the foreign nationals, while the victims come to terms with what’s happened.
“We’re just an ordinary couple,” says Stephen, who is with his wife Cara. “This will change us.”