Back in the early days of Casualty there’d be plenty of time for Charlie (Derek Thompson) and Duffy (Cathy Shipton) to mend patient’s broken hearts and fractured relationships while they were stitching their wounds. There was always plenty of time to talk.
Now, as the 37th series gets going, Charlie Fairhead may still be there but the environment he’s working in has changed. In this gritty series opener, the ED was at full stretch with ambulances queuing up outside to offload seriously ill – even dying – patients, while the staff struggled to find bed space inside for people who badly needed it.
‘Morale is at an all-time low,’ Dylan (William Beck) told Charlie, but Charlie had just returned from holiday on the island of Kos where he’d sat under the tree where Hippocrates came up with the very oath that medical professionals work by even today. He was tanned, refreshed and ready for anything. ‘We can turn it around,’ he told Dylan confidently.
Then the reality of the pressures they were under took hold. A young woman died of an overdose after having to stay on the ambulance for 40 minutes because there was no space in the department for her. Toni (Josephine Lloyd-Welcome), a woman with Crohn’s, ended up having a permanent ileostomy because she’d collapsed on the floor while nobody was paying attention to her.
‘The system isn’t a thing, it’s people,’ she told Charlie. ‘We can believe in people – but I’m not sure I do any more.’
Later a shell-shocked Charlie talked to Dylan about how his day had gone wrong, from forgetting that Toni was waiting to be seen, to blurting out some information that led to a patient getting hurt by an angry and distraught relative, who then hurt Sah (Arin Smethurst) when he pushed them into a trolley.
‘All I needed today was time to talk,’ Charlie said sadly. ‘I couldn’t even manage that.’
But all was not as bleak as Charlie thought. Dylan told him that his words had got through to at least one young patient, and promised that although they couldn’t change the NHS, between the two of them and the leaves from Hippocrates’ tree that Charlie had brought back in his wallet, they would be ok.
He went home and took everything out of Ollie’s room and burned it. Will it help him to move on? We can only hope so.
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