NHS staff struggling to make ends meet
BBC Two, Wednesday, 9pm
FILMED over six weeks during the past three months, Hospital is the story of the NHS in unprecedented times.
Edited and broadcast within weeks of filming, this timely six part series captures the day-to-day realities facing the NHS today.
With exceptional access to one of the UK’s biggest and busiest NHS Trusts, Hospital will bring audiences intensely close to the issues and challenges that continually dominate the headlines.
Each episode will show with exceptional candour the ever-increasing demands on the NHS’s ser- vices, from intricate and morally complex medical ethics to health tourism; from A&E overcrowding to cancelled operations.
Shown from multiple perspectives and for the first time, the audience will see the extraordinary dilemmas and decisionmaking which happen every day for the consultants, surgeons and bed managers, all of which have profound consequences for patients and treatments.
Crews shot across five hospitals in Imperial College Healthcare Trust London, following the key decision-makers as they attempt to care for nearly 20,000 people every week. But standing in their way are limited resources, an increasing number of emergency patients and a clock that never stops ticking.
In the first episode, filmed in 2016, two patients await life-saving surgery at St Mary’s in Paddington, the biggest of the Trust’s five hospitals. They will both need a bed on the intensive care ward. But the hospital is full to capacity and there is only one bed left.
The surgeons slated to carry out the operations – Professor George Hanna and Richard Gibbs– are at the centre of this film. We follow their attempts to do the right thing for both patients in a complex life-and-death situation where two into one just won’t go.