Two years ago, former NHS doctor Grace Ofori-Attah created the relentlessly tense first series of Malpractice, a tale of an A&E doctor whose errors under impossible pressure, combined with the inexperience and equal stresses of others, resulted in the death of a patient. Then things escalated. It took in topical medical subjects – primarily the creeping problem of opioid addiction – alongside social issues, including the manifold effects of the pandemic, the prevalence of burnout, the bureaucratic inefficiencies that hinder staff and patients, the institutional buck-passing and arse-covering that greet any type of mistake, and the potential for corruption that exists in any large organisation. It asked how much we should expect of people trapped in a system starved of resources, how much human fallibility we should tolerate in healthcare. It was fast and in every sense furious, written as leanly and cleanly by Ofori-Attah as only someone with direct experience of a particular environment can.
Only one episode of the new series is available for review but it looks to be shaping up just as well as the first. Psychiatric doctor James Ford (Tom Hughes) needs to be in two places at once: doing an assessment on shaky new mother Rosie (Hannah McLean), whose GP Dr Sophia Hernandez (Am I Being Unreasonable’s Selin Hizli), contacts him about as the on-call psychiatrist during Rosie’s postnatal checkup, and attending the sectioning of a troubled, crack-addicted pregnant woman at her home where the police are already waiting and threatening to leave if they have to do so much longer.
