Daily Mail

Code Red in the NHS and an hour of TV to leave you deeply worried

- CHRISTOPHE­R STEVENS

Professor George Hanna is quietly beside himself with frustratio­n and anger. He has a cancer patient who requires an immediate, major operation to survive.

He has an operating theatre available for the six-hour procedure, to remove the man’s diseased gullet and replace it with plastic tubes. He has a highly trained staff, including an anaestheti­st and specialist nurses. He has equipment worth millions in one of the best hospitals in europe.

But he is forbidden to do the op. There are no beds available in the intensive care unit where the patient will go to recover.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. There is a bed . . . but by the time Professor Hanna has finished the operation, another patient will probably have filled it.

so for the rest of the day the bed remains empty, the theatre unused, the surgical team stand idle and one of the most brilliant surgeons in Britain, who could be saving somebody’s life, must sit on his hands.

(BBC2) did a superb job of explaining this complex situation without melodramat­ics. The cameras spent a week at st Mary’s in Paddington, London, recording the everyday catastroph­es that are consuming the health service.

on Monday, the hospital was at ‘Code red’. That alone ought to provoke national outrage: no part of the NHs should ever share its status with a nuclear power station in radioactiv­e meltdown.

Code red means there are no beds available anywhere, either in this hospital or within the health trust. Managers are talking about the ‘full capacity protocol’, a bureaucrat­ic euphemism for extreme measures, such as placing adults in children’s wards. one administra­tor guiltily reminds her colleagues that in a real pinch nearby gyms can make useful spaces for extra beds.

There has been no terrorist attack, no flu epidemic or motorway pile-up. It’s not even freezing outside. But the hospital is overwhelme­d with admissions, and the admin staff are talking about emergency measures more appropriat­e for the aftermath of an atomic disaster.

This documentar­y did not get mired in explanatio­ns of how the overcrowdi­ng crisis has developed. Admissions to A&e are 10 per cent higher than last year, every bed is taken, and that’s all we need to know.

Instead, the point was driven home by snappy interviews with senior doctors across the hospital. None of them had time to spare, and they all said the same thing. ‘every day we feel like we are just struggling to stay afloat,’ said one.

‘It seems rare to be allowed to go ahead and actually do an op,’ said another. ‘The elastic’s closer to breaking than ever,’ warned a third. This was a programme with a single message, which never lost its focus or allowed its intensity to relent for a moment — an hour of television to leave you worn out and deeply worried.

Balm for the soul was on offer from The Reassemble­r (BBC4), a half-hour of occupation­al therapy in which James May slowly rebuilds vintage machinery from a neat array of component nuts and bolts. His chums nickname him Captain slow but, as he spent 13 hours putting together a child’s Japanese motorbike from the sixties, he was more like Captain eternity. Whole epochs passed in the time it took him to count out ball bearings or find the right screwdrive­r.

And all the while he talks constantly. His voice is like a singlecyli­nder engine, chuntering away at a steady rhythm that never accelerate­s or hiccups. In earlier documentar­ies, such as his Cars of The People series a couple of years ago, he tried too hard to copy his colleague Jeremy Clarkson’s style and humour.

But in The reassemble­r he is completely himself, an amiable man who finds deep pleasure in boring minutiae and knows that lots of viewers do too.

Last week he discoursed at length on the difference between a bolt and a screw, and how there was no hard-and-fast distinctio­n. This week, feeling he hadn’t done the topic justice, he chatted about it for another ten minutes.

At heart James May is a secondary school woodwork teacher who became a TV presenter by sheer bad luck. His mismanaged career is our good fortune.

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