Hospital

On Merseyside, operating theatres shut but emergencies continue to arrive as patients are caught up in an extraordinary hospital move.

In Aintree Hospital’s major trauma centre, a 15-strong team are trying to save the life of a young man who has been stabbed in the chest – one of three stabbings to arrive during the day.

Heart disease remains the biggest killer in the UK and every 5 minutes, across the country, someone has a heart attack. Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital's specialist services are on the frontline of this modern epidemic.

As medical advances save children who a decade ago may not have survived, Alder Hey Children's Hospital faces the challenge of providing ongoing care for these complex patients.

With NHS ‘bed blocking’ numbers at their highest level since 2017, for those who are medically fit to leave, multi-billion pound cuts to social and community care services have left a shortage of care-home beds, equipment, staff and housing, effectively stranding these patients in hospital. With a duty to oversee safe discharges, this leaves the NHS no choice but to keep these medically-fit patients in hospital.

In Accident and Emergency at the Royal Liverpool Hospital, a woman is brought in by ambulance after experiencing an unexplained seizure, one of 1,400 the emergency department will see this year. As seizures can be a warning sign of a complex brain condition, patients like this will be referred onto a neurological specialist to determine what has caused this episode. At least one in nine people who present to A&E with seizures have symptoms of FND.

Alder Hey Children's Hospital is home to a world-renowned craniofacial department, one of only four in the UK treating life-threatening congenital skull and facial abnormalities.

The final episode looks at radical new treatments and surgeries offering cancer patients hopes of survival, including two-year-old Yeshua, who has a tumour in his abdomen. In Iraq, where he was born, Yeshua was given a five per cent chance of survival. Though high doses of chemotherapy have shrunk the tumour over the past six months, in order for Yeshua to survive he needs an extremely complicated 12-hour operation at Alder Hey Children's Hospital to remove as much of the growth as possible.