Health

Critical Condition: the most nerve-shreddingly hardcore hospital doc ever


‘After being stabbed three times, John is bleeding to death.” So says an introductory caption at the start of Critical Condition, Channel 5’s almost unwatchably intense new documentary series filmed in the trauma and emergency departments at Royal Stoke University hospital.

Indeed, John is bleeding to death, visibly, so that’s all we need to know. Critical Condition ramps up a genre that had hitherto peaked with 24 Hours in A&E, by ruthlessly stripping out what look in retrospect like indulgent, comforting embellishments. There is no voiceover, no charming patient backstories, no interviews with the patients at home months later to reassure us they haven’t died. It’s just hardcore lifesaving medicine in a constant nerve-shredding torrent.

There is a good reason for this, which is that Critical Condition shifts the focus on to the doctors, mimicking the experience of practising this kind of medicine. The jarringly jaunty ringtone on the trauma centre’s phone keeps going off, each time presaging the arrival in a few minutes of someone on the verge of oblivion, someone who will die if the team make a mistake.

Narrative shift … consultant Rahulan Dharmarajah at Royal Stoke University hospital in Critical Condition.



Someone will die if he makes a mistake … consultant Rahulan Dharmarajah at Royal Stoke University hospital. Photograph: Channel 5

It is this knowledge, underlined by the odd telling soundbite from the medics, that makes Critical Condition so gripping – because the footage is soberly filmed, even verging on slow. The show has a weakness for the sort of looming, grinding soundtrack that usually accompanies the arrival of a murderer in a crime drama, and loves to focus unblinkingly on upsetting images, but careful, methodical work is its stock in trade.

The doctors rarely raise their voices. Nobody ever screams for 100mg of adrenaline, stat, or shouts “Come ON, goddammit!” at a flatlining monitor. At one point, when saving a guy who has had a massive heart attack gets tricky – they need to sedate and temporarily paralyse him – the trauma team leader ticks off the necessary procedures one by one from a laminated checklist. (That’s not the only thing that’s surprising if you’ve watched too much ER and Casualty. Another revelation: nearly everyone ends up in a CT scanner once they have been stabilised, because until then the doctors can’t see what’s wrong. They gather in the control booth to watch the live pictures, saying things such as: “Agh, nasty!” or: “Whooooa!”)

In this environment, the tension mounts inexorably, as every pulse check and catheter insertion becomes fraught with significance. The case then often moves on to surgery, which is frequently jaw-dropping – episode one’s removal of a blood clot from a stroke victim’s brain includes shots both of the clot itself lying on a wodge of cotton wool afterwards, and of a scan of blood flowing back into vessels that were previously closed. The procedure is usually followed by a determinedly understated but devastatingly emotional scene of the patient, having come round, responding to a request to squeeze the surgeon’s hand. Miraculously, they are alive.

Geoff, one of the patients in the series, after surgery.



This will stick with you … Geoff, one of the patients in the series, after surgery. Photograph: Channel 5

Or not, because Critical Condition deals in death as well as its omnipresent possibility. It’s here where the show’s occasional bending of its own rule about not bothering to get to know the patients is most effective: an upcoming episode’s conversation between a doctor and an elderly man who can’t be saved has such dignity and delicacy. Even more powerful is the moment where a man who needs an operation to fix his ripped aorta asks the surgeon if they should just get on with it and not wait for his eight-year-old son to visit: there’s a brief, measured exchange between them in which the doctor communicates the crucial information – which is that no, they should wait, because … this might be the last time the boy sees his dad.

In one grave instance, it’s just a caption, ending with the words “… but it was not enough”, to remind you what’s at stake, as if you had forgotten. “Every doctor will have a case that sticks with them,” says the medic who couldn’t have done any more, as the phone starts ringing again. Every one of the cases in Critical Condition will stick with you.

Critical Condition starts on Channel 5 on 13 March at 9pm.



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