The BBC series homes in on University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire Trust, where a pandemic backlog and dire lack of funds has led to agony all round. Show them the money!
Just. Give. Them. Some. Money. That’s all. Such has been the unavoidable – however unbiased the makers – message of every documentary about the NHS since … well, let’s say for simplicity’s sake, since documentaries set in NHS hospitals and other outposts began. With Covid-19, the number of the documentaries and the intensity of the message have increased. How can they not, during a pandemic and under a government that has seen in that pandemic the opportunity to line the pockets of its cronies when it should, at last, be investing in one of the glories of the country, a shining example to the world of socialised, free healthcare.
Back for a seventh season, Hospital (BBC One) is one such series rising in intensity as it turns to the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire Trust – the first to deliver a Covid vaccine outside trials – to examine how it is managing the continuing effects of coronavirus. The flood of Covid patients has receded, but now the trust is fighting a huge backlog of increasingly desperate and deteriorating cardiac, neurological, orthopaedic and cancer patients. These built up while every available resource had to be devoted to working out how to treat the victims that threatened to overwhelm every hospital everywhere.
