Sobering reality of life on the wards

Hospital (BBC2)

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There are simple, stark headlines – and then the chaotic, mad, brutal reality.

When the NHS in England announced hospitals would be cancelling non-urgent operations in January, cameras from this fascinating documentary were already filming in Nottingham.

It wasn’t so much a case of the place bursting at the seams, it was already burst.

Every inch of the A&E was full of patients on trolleys, already seen but with no beds to go to. Staff were coming back the following morning and finding the same patients stuck there.

The nurses and doctors were pushed to the limit, feeling helplessly that they were letting the patients down.

One said in heartfelt fashion that these weren’t statistics, they were your spouse or parent, sibling or child.

You could only feel for those who had to make the call to tell patients who’d waited ages for a knee or hip operation to ease their agonies that it was being cancelled at the last minute.

And, bizarrely, those cancellations meant surgeons stood in eerily empty theatres wondering how to fill their time.

Meanwhile, the accountants were totting up the millions of pounds in payments not coming in.

Amid the chaos there was some black humour. A nurse had finally managed to free up a bed – only to lose the patient’s vital medication and was frantically trying to find it lest the discharge fell through.

Mostly, though, the state of our health service was no laughing matter.

▼ Good Karma Hospital (itv)

There’s always just as much chaos in the madhouse of this Indian hospital.

But then no government would ever dare tell Amanda Redman’s steely doc what to do!