Channel 4 Dispatches Documentary...NHS..Full episode

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 The Lemming 10 Mar 2023

This was aired last night on Channel 4, about the state of the Ambulance Service and the NHS as a whole at the moment. Its a fair reflection, however in my opinion it was dialled down for general consumption because the reality would be too horrific to put on air, even for the watershed of 9pm.

youtube.com/watch?v=wbTW-Y0we04&

Undercover Ambulance: NHS In Chaos | Dispatches | Channel 4 Documentaries

Putting aside the undercover narrator over using a bit of dramatic licence, all the incidents shown stood on their own as serious situations.

Hopefully this episode will give a glimpse of what every single member of the NHS, ranging from nurse assistants, nurses, doctors, cleaning staff, welfare volunteers, and ambulance staff have endured for several years on an hour-by-hour basis till they clock off and endure again and again and again until either retirement, burn-out, resignation or worse by sacking due to negligence as a result of unrelenting mental and physical exhaustion.

A polite request to the MODs, I chose this forum because the NHS is not a political subject but rather a social subject affecting society.

Post edited at 14:44
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 Luke90 10 Mar 2023
In reply to The Lemming:

> A polite request to the MODs, I chose this forum because the NHS is not a political subject but rather a social subject affecting society.

Don't be silly, it's quite clearly political and you know it or you wouldn't be adding the extra plea to the mods. The reason you're posting it here isn't that you think it's a "social subject affecting society", and therefore somehow non-political, it's that you think it's too important a subject for anyone to be allowed to choose not to see the thread by hiding the politics forum.

I agree with you that it's a vitally important topic, but I don't think your tactic of repeatedly insisting it belongs in the non-political forums will actually help your cause at all. If people have chosen to turn off the political forums, they won't suddenly be won over by your points, they'll just be annoyed.

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 Ciro 10 Mar 2023
In reply to Luke90:

Whilst decisions on how to run the NHS are certainly political, I think it's a bit unfair to tell public sector workers they can't discuss their working conditions outside a closed political bubble of the forum.

If I wanted to have a rant about the conditions in retail banking nobody would be asking to have it moved.

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 Luke90 10 Mar 2023
In reply to Ciro:

Fair point. I think I'd misread who was posting it.

OP The Lemming 10 Mar 2023
In reply to The Lemming:

It would seem that the link won't play instantly because it is age appropriate.

Please put the following into the YouTube search bar.

"Undercover Ambulance: NHS In Chaos | Dispatches | Channel 4 Documentaries"

I am sorry that I can't provide a working link as Channel 4 made it age appropriate. It lasts about 45 minutes

Post edited at 16:36
 Stichtplate 10 Mar 2023
In reply to The Lemming:

The most terrible aspect for me is the normalisation of unnecessary pain, suffering and death on an industrial scale, day in, day out.

The completely unacceptable has been accepted.

Nobody is at all surprised when they hear of someone's granny lying on a floor in agony with a broken hip, spending hours waiting for an ambulance. Nobody is at all surprised when they hear of someone's wife or husband suffering a stroke or heart attack and not receiving any medical treatment for hours. Hours that could prove fatal or cause irreversible damage and disability.

How has this become acceptable? Can you imagine if you were trapped in a house fire but service overstretch meant it'd be a few hours before help arrived? Can you imagine watching someone being kicked to death, phoning 999 and being told "sorry, we're very busy at the moment".

It didn't used to be like this. The current government have pursued policies that have made it like this. I know a lot of people don't like the word Evil, but what else do you call it?

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OP The Lemming 10 Mar 2023
In reply to Stichtplate:

That episode brought back memories that I buried deep in a box, hoping never to reflect on again.

😥

OP The Lemming 10 Mar 2023
In reply to The Lemming:

Just found out the EMT was/is an actor who did the course.

I suspected that he was hamming up his roll, but this news has discussed me.

We work fekin hard for somebody to make a doc for his own gain when we do this day in day out.

 Stichtplate 10 Mar 2023
In reply to The Lemming:

To be fair, I'd have hoped none of us actually in the job for genuine reasons could bring ourselves to secretly film patients, relatives and colleagues in the worst of circumstances. 

There's obvious value in the exposure but it still leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

OP The Lemming 11 Mar 2023
In reply to Stichtplate:

Apart from being a sackable offence, would you want to work with somebody who filmed you and the TV channel make it easy for viewers to identify you by voice or patients or their relatives?

There may be trust issues.

Putting all this side, the comments from the real medical professionals way above our pay grade gave good insight to the difficulties we all endure.

 Stichtplate 11 Mar 2023
In reply to The Lemming:

> Apart from being a sackable offence, would you want to work with somebody who filmed you and the TV channel make it easy for viewers to identify you by voice or patients or their relatives?

Totally unethical and a clear breech of Caldicott principles. What right have scores of production company employees to go through footage of hundreds of patient contacts? The footage of the mental health patient in A&E was just voyeuristic garbage and the tech/actors contributions managed to be both overly mawkish and lacking authenticity (but after xxx series of Ambulance filmed in our respective sectors, we know how that goes).

> There may be trust issues.

Just a bit...

> Putting all this side, the comments from the real medical professionals way above our pay grade gave good insight to the difficulties we all endure.

Yeah, it was a good piece but I'd rather the case had been made with the masses of verifiable data available, more expert contributions (like the president of the Royal college of emergency medicine) and above board interviews. 

 gld73 11 Mar 2023
In reply to The Lemming:

His opinion piece in iNews says he only filmed the jobs where patients had long waits for ambulances or at hospital ..."We were looking for specific cases where patients were coming to harm. If a case didn't fit that criteria and they hadn’t been waiting a long time for an ambulance, then I wouldn’t be filming them." ... so he and the production company weren't going into it to give a balanced view.

I'm certainly not saying a rosy picture should be painted instead - we all know the system is over-stretched and has significant problems, and some of the people filmed may well have agreed to the footage being aired if they'd been asked subsequently to give permission, in order to show some of the unacceptable situations which arose - but a lot of the time we do get to patients in a timely manner, and do help them. 

As for filming patients and colleagues without permission, and then putting them on national tv without permission, that makes me hugely uncomfortable. As above, some people could have been so disgusted with the situation they were in that they would have been willing to give consent for it to be shown, but the Technician and the production company opted not to even try. Blurring out a face doesn't hide someone's identity if you know them well.

We have a notice up in the back of all our ambulances explaining to patients the legal situations where information and images could be shared, and I'm pretty sure "One of our employees making a secret TV documentary" isn't on there...

 Stichtplate 11 Mar 2023
In reply to gld73:

> but a lot of the time we do get to patients in a timely manner, and do help them. 

Glad it wasn't too bad in your sector over the Winter, but round our way 10 or 12 hour waits for OAPs with bust hips became so commonplace as to barely warrant a raised eyebrow and I have totally lost count of the number of pre-alert jobs that ended up on a corridor instead of resus

 Rob Parsons 12 Mar 2023
In reply to The Lemming:

> Just found out the EMT was/is an actor who did the course.

Is the suggestion that this person was a 'sleeper' who deliberately joined up in order to make an undercover documentary at some later stage?

What are his ex-colleagues saying? (I assume you might have online forums where paramedics compare experiences etc.)


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