Grace Ofori-Attah has arguably done more in ten years than most people have done in thirty. She’s been a doctor, she’s been a medical consultant, she’s worked with Idris Elba - and now her debut TV show is out on ITV.
Titled Malpractice, it stars Niamh Algar as Lucinda Edwards, an A&E doctor who finds herself in the centre of a medical malpractice investigation when one of her patients dies of an opioid overdose.
It’s a bold first outing, but Ofori-Attah has plenty of experience to draw from: in addition to her growing list of scriptwriting credentials, she was in the medical profession herself for years, working her way up the ranks as a trainee, then junior doctor.
Growing up, did she want to be a doctor, or a writer? Both: Ofori-Attah took English as one of her A-levels before going onto read medicine at both Cambridge and Oxford.
But she always kept writing, nurturing dreams of becoming an author even while studying she studied psychology as part of her degree (describing herself as “always fascinated by behaviour”) and afterwards spent some time working as a consultant psychiatrist in Camden and Islington.
It was here that her first script, titled Ward Six, came into being. “When I was a registrar… I decided to write a screenplay for the first time,” she says.
“I’d been trying for so long to write books, and I just couldn’t really ever get very far with them. So I thought I’d write scripts, because I could probably finish it quicker.”
It was this short script – based on Chekhov’s short story, Ward No. 6 – that was eventually picked up by World Production, the company behind smash-hit show Line of Duty. They asked Ofori-Attah to develop it into what became Malpractice, which she did while burnishing her scriptwriting credentials on other shows (which, incidentally, is how she met Idris Elba, after being called in to work on his show In The Long Run).
Along the way, she picked up several accolades, becoming the first Writer’s Apprentice for Carnival Film & Television and being selected for the BAFTA Elevate talent scheme for writers in 2018.
Needless to say, a lot of her personal experiences made it into Malpractice – including the scene at the start of the show where an armed gunman bursts into the hospital lobby dragging an unconscious body with him. That was embellished (in real life, there wasn’t a gun, but there were two bodies), but there were a lot of less obvious moments that made it in too.
“Thinking back, there are so many dramatic things that happened, which at the time… you’re not numb to it. But every day, there’s something that would be extraordinary for an individual to deal with, but it happens.”
“I’ve tried to put in the things… that really, really stuck with me.” That includes lumbar punctures, frantic nights spent trying to stabilise patients and the general chaos of working in a hospital.
What also made it in were the chats that Ofori-Attah used to have with her supervisor, Dr William Shanahan, who also spent time working as a medical investigator for the GMC, or General Medical Council (he worked as a consultant on Malpractice).
“In our weekly supervisions I got this extra component of education about the GMC process and medical tribunals and the kind of things that you could do that you might not even realise were terrible,” she says. One example? Going to a party where others are taking drugs: if reported, you’re considered to “have brought the profession into disrepute.” Eek.
“I was getting his horror stories… it’s so hard. It seems so harsh on doctors, because who sets those standards?” She cites one example of living in Notting Hill, panicking because “I’m walking around the streets with the carnival, and people are definitely doing drugs.”
Though she’s no longer a doctor (she quit practising during the pandemic) Ofori-Attah is clearly still passionate about the industry, and about the subject of mental health in general. Mental health is a huge feature of Malpractice – when we meet her, Lucinda is still recovering from burnout.
That’s not unusual among her real-life counterparts either, though Ofori-Attah says things have improved since she was in the profession.
“Now, there’s a lot more attention that’s being paid to [mental health],” she says. “I feel like when I was working, it was more, you’re sort of chosen because you’re resilient, and you should be able to cope with it... you don’t ever really want to show that you can’t deal with that, that these things are distressing.”
One of her best friends, she says, took their own life “before we even finished our course. There are a couple other students in my cohort, just from my one university who killed themselves, you know, and that’s in your course. It’s kind of extraordinary that that should happen.”
Despite having left the profession to focus on writing full-time, she’s also been keeping tabs on the controversial subject of the junior doctor’s strikes.
“I think with past junior doctor strikes, I found some of the debates pretty difficult to listen to, because I think there’s a lot of misinformation,” she says. “It’s hard to hear public opinion on how you should be living your life because you’ve chosen a job that is vocational.
“People just sometimes have quite fixed ideas about what a doctor is and what a doctor should be and forget that doctors are patients too; doctors are people we’re not robots. We’re not units of, you know, medical efficiency.”
With Malpractice now about to be released, Ofori-Attah has her hands full writing several different projects – but could a second series be in the works?
“I would love there to be a series two,” she says. Though she’s aware of the responsibility of writing about her former colleagues, “I think there are many complex areas of medicine where sometimes bad practice happens, because the system is the way it is. And I’d love to explore as many of those as possible.”
