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It’s been a busy few weeks in our house, some might say hectic or chaotic. 

It’s even been hard to find 10 minutes to have a conversation with my wife about anything, our planned retreat to Celebrity Juice last Thursday night was scotched by the ITI Study club.

So, on Monday night we rushed around to get things organised, horses ridden (my wife) dishes done, homework, dog walked, so that at 9pm we could sit down and watch Hospital on BBC 2.

25 years ago, there was a ‘fly on the wall’ documentary on the BBC called Intensive Care. It aired just weeks before I came to work at Queens Medical Centre in Nottingham as a Senior House Officer. It was based in the intensive care unit there. I was able to watch my future consultants walk on and off TV like gods, glorifying in the wonderful treatment that they had provided and how they have saved or changed people’s lives.

Hospital is filmed in the same place, but it’s very different 25 years on.

If you haven’t seen it and you work in Healthcare then its mandatory watching.

If you work in healthcare and you watch it, I dare you to try not to cry.

If you don’t cry then I don’t think you should be working in healthcare.

There are the obvious human-interest story elements of the young lad who had spinal surgery which is a totally extraordinary story but there are the other stories in the background of the people working in the national health service day after day who have not had a pay increase for 8 years, trying to manage the impossible job of healthcare in the UK under the current system.

There was a star though, as there always is in these programmes, catapulted into the lime light by sheer chance and circumstances, the spinal surgeon Mike Grevitt. He operated on a 12-year-old boy with scoliosis in the most extraordinary circumstances and the outcome was incredible.

He operated and treated that boy against a back drop of a black alert at Queens Medical Centre (and all around the country) when we couldn’t treat the people we needed to treat because the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The NHS is funded by a society which sees having Sky TV as a right and would pay less tax if they could.

My job means nothing in the light of what I saw on Monday night. In the next episode, my wife’s colleagues will be involved which will reaffirm that sentiment to me.

But I learned something very important (or perhaps I remembered it). When Mike Grevitt was explaining to the young lad and his family the risks of surgery he used a phrase that will stick with me for the rest of my career.

“We’re putting you in harm’s way to try to get you to a better place”.

That applies to all of us, it’s essential for patients to understand that every time they sit down.

Blog post number: 1596