No, not me, just a plug for the documentary series on C4 which is a brilliantly-made demonstration of how emergency health services work at their highest and best pitch, with each and every team in professional co-ordination. You begin to see how many people are directly and essentially involved in treating all those who without notice require urgent attention. From the paramedics who collect casualties from the street or fly in the air ambulances, through the trauma medics and nurses, technicians, pathologists and many others unseen, to the cleaners who mop the blood from the floor, all the swift and skilled operations, even if speeded up somewhat via TV editing, are truly remarkable and very worth remarking on. And the individual staff featured are wonderfully terse in their refusal to take credit or centre stage; hats off to the production team too, which has resisted the push to create a new group of media celebrities.
24 Hours in A&E is also a tacit demonstration both of why the NHS is so prized in Britain, and why there is hostility towards privatisation of medical care. Watching this series, one can easily envisage a scenario where payment is one stage in the admission process, or where repeated hospital admissions for chronic conditions are rationed by the insurance policy. We don't want to be there.
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