Complaints plummeted and job applications soared at a London hospital trust after it allowed TV cameras behind the scenes to witness the reality of life in the NHS.
Bosses at Imperial College Healthcare believe groundbreaking BBC2 series Hospital helped educate patients about the daily challenge of coping with soaring demand on limited resources.
The documentary made front-page headlines when A&E medics revealed they were “firefighting every single day” as the NHS endured the worst winter crisis in its history.
Watched by 2.5 million viewers per episode, it was described by critics as “extraordinary” and “brilliant and brave”. It showed how despite financial challenges Imperial’s doctors were able to perform amazing work such as heart surgery on a 98-year-old man.
Filming on a four-part second series, to be shown this summer, began last week. It will focus on mental health and social care.
Michelle Dixon, Imperial’s director of communications, said that after the progamme there was a “big drop” in the number of complaints from patients relating to clinical care.
At the same time, there was a 50 per cent increase in job applications from people wanting to join the trust, which runs five hospitals including St Mary’s in Paddington and Charing Cross in Hammersmith. Ms Dixon believes the series helped people appreciate that decisions to delay an operation were “very clinically driven” and in the best interest of all patients. Non-urgent operations were postponed to enable emergency cases to be prioritised.
“The proportion of complaints about clinical issues really dropped, from about 75 per cent of complaints to 15 per cent,” Ms Dixon said.
“One thing we are looking at is how does this [documentary] help us communicate and engage with people? Is it when people understand more about what is going on? They might be unfortunate in waiting a long time for an operation. They may understand beds are under pressure, so they may not complain about certain things. We don’t know whether it’s good or bad but something seemed to happen in the period the documentary went out.”
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The series also highlighted the cost of treating foreign patients, showing one case in which a Nigerian woman ran up a bill of more than £330,000, which she was unable to pay, when she went into labour prematurely with quadruplets on a flight home via London after being turned away from the US.
Ms Dixon said: “A lot of the stories that were used to make wider points were not told in a simplistic or sensationalist way. It didn’t try to put a spin on it. It told it like it is. We didn’t think we had anything to hide.
“It was interesting to see how much appetite there was [among viewers] for explaining things.”@RossLydall
