WWhen Dr Rachel Clarke first started writing down her experiences of working in a Covid-19 ward, she never intended to make them public. Her notes, which she scribbled at her kitchen table, usually in the middle of the night when she was too stressed to sleep, were originally intended as a kind of private therapy: a place to process all the horrors she felt she couldn’t talk about. or not for someone who had not been there.
It was only after news of Dominic Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle broke – exposing the shocking disparity between the sacrifices ordinary people had to make and the way people in government felt entitled to behave – that she became angry . enough to turn those notes into the memoir that eventually became this week’s ITV drama Breathtaking.
When I interviewed Clarke a few weeks ago and asked whether her experiences with Covid-19 had changed her as a person, I wondered about the cumulative emotional impact of witnessing so many deaths one after the other. But what was truly transformative, she said, was experiencing “the unforgivable human consequence of a government’s lack of candor with the public.” Combining true-to-life news footage of politicians giving smoothly reassuring press conferences with dramatic depictions of what really happened on NHS wards, this series brings to life the sickening feeling of being lied to and almost violently betrayed.
We have long known that nurses are cobbling together makeshift protective gowns from garbage bags, even as the Department of Health publicly insisted there was never a shortage of personal protective equipment, or potentially Covid-positive people being pushed out of hospital and into care. houses without testing them first. Meanwhile, the opening scene of Breathtaking, in which fictional consultant Abbey Henderson discovers that a mask meant to protect her from a deadly virus does not fit because it is shaped for male jaws, almost eerily echoes the evidence of senior civil servant Helen MacNamara. to last year’s Covid inquiry about how difficult it was to get the problems women were experiencing with PPE taken seriously in Whitehall.
But as with Mr Bates versus the Post Office, the ITV drama about wrongly convicted sub-postmasters whose fallout continues to ripple through British politics this week, drama is still able to illuminate issues that public inquiries cannot. And perhaps never more so than in the days leading up to yet another series of strikes by junior doctors, which will hit English hospitals from Saturday. Welsh from Wednesday and Northern Ireland in March.
Like most people with a loved one on an NHS waiting list, I am frankly nervous about any form of industrial action that will only bringing the serve closer to the breaking point, no matter how well-founded. But I wonder if Breathtaking won’t tilt public opinion heavily toward the junior doctors’ cause, just at the point where sympathy may be running out.
Being cooped up at home was of course torture for many people, from women trapped in abusive relationships to parents trying to entertain crazy children in flats with no outdoor space, not to mention the chronically lonely. But what this TV series quietly highlights is the difference between what many people have experienced at home, as difficult as it has been, and what the frontline medical staff have experienced on our behalf.
Some unfortunately didn’t survive to tell the story. Others have stayed behind life-altering physical illness or a disability as a result of contracting Covid-19, or else suffered a nervous breakdown and burnout, in some cases so bad that they had to leave medicine altogether. Last year a questionnaire of more than 600 doctors with long Covid symptoms, carried out by pressure group Long Covid Doctors for Action, found that fewer than one in three (31%) doctors said they worked full-time, compared to more than half (57%) before the onset of their illness. Nearly one in five was too sick to work at all. And despite government promises for specialist clinics to treat this still poorly understood condition, more than half felt their symptoms had not been properly researched.
Many of those still working in the NHS are struggling with the feeling that talking about their experiences during the height of the pandemic is self-indulgent, or that no one wants to hear them. Still, this was the closest civilian doctors and nurses came to living in a war zone, and the parallels with soldiers returning from their missions are unmistakable: the flashbacks (and sometimes PTSD), the difficulty of talking to anyone about it. who wasn’t there and doesn’t understand it, and especially the bleakly isolating feeling that the world just wants to move on and now wants to forget all that.
There is no NHS or social care equivalent of the military covenant, or the understanding that those willing to risk their lives on behalf of their country can be cared for by the state in return. But when you look at Breathtaking, you might wonder why not.
As Clarke told me, it’s not that doctors expected something as crude as financial reward for doing their work at the height of a pandemic, but they didn’t expect to become active either. worse off in real terms than ten years ago. For all the fine words spoken about care workers when they were the ones holding the hands of dying people in nursing homes, both major parties have remained suspiciously silent on social care in the run-up to the election, as an exasperated Andrew Dilnot said. (who was commissioned by David Cameron in 2010 to propose supposedly urgent reforms) was spotted this weekend.
The speed with which public gratitude evaporated when it came to putting real money on the table remains startling and shameful. Meanwhile, frontline workers’ feeling that they have been abandoned and lied to does not go away simply because most of the individual politicians who presided over that insipid era have been succeeded by a new influx.
Since living through the pandemic was miserable enough, I initially didn’t think I wanted to watch a drama about it, no matter how gripping it was written. But Breathtaking is a timely reminder that the lockdown has divided us into two very different worlds: those who spent the first and second waves in hospital, as patients or as staff, and those who can only imagine what that was like. Four years later, we can debate how exactly the moral debt owed to frontline workers should be paid. But it has become infinitely more difficult to pretend it doesn’t exist.