A while back, I suggested we formally recognise a devastating genre of documentary that focuses on suffering caused to the vulnerable by uncaring national institutions and systems, and name it the “Shit Rolls Downhill” category. How would you feel about broadening the field to include dramas based on real events? When They See Us, which tells the harrowing stories of the Central Park Five, or Responsible Child, about the UK’s legal system that allows children as young as 10 to be tried for murder as adults, would be eligible, for example. So, too, would The Cure (Channel 4), a retelling of Julie Bailey’s fight, after the death of her mother, Bella, in 2007, at Stafford hospital, to expose the welter of extraordinary failures in patient care at the hospital and Mid Staffordshire NHS foundation trust, which ran it.
In Amanda Duke’s dramatisation, we first meet Julie and Bella as they bid a tearful farewell to Julie’s daughter, who is off to university. Soon after, Bella (Sue Johnston) collapses, vomiting. The ambulance arrives, the paramedics reckon it is her hiatus hernia playing up – all manageable, no cause for concern – and take her to hospital.
During their eight-hour wait to be seen, admitted and finally directed to the right ward, they see many discomfiting sights. There are dirty swabs and blood on the floor, nurses dismissive of a patient moaning in pain, and a general air of chaos. When Julie (Sian Brooke) tells the ward sister her mother has missed her usual medication because of the wait, she is brusquely told she will just have to wait for the next scheduled drugs round. Nothing is quite right. Nothing is as it should be.
Except, perhaps, for senior management, whose dreams of gaining foundational status for Mid Staffs are nearing fruition. Books have been balanced by the new CEO, Martin Yeates, £10m saved with the loss of only 150 nursing posts, and all the rest of it is outlined in PowerPoint presentations and brochures aimed at securing semi-independence from the Department of Health and the freedom to manage their own finances and run the trust “like a business”. In vain, one of the board’s medical staff asks why only glancing attention is paid to the effects Yeates’s plans will have on patient care and ward safety. “Financial stability goes hand in hand with quality healthcare,” replies Yeates. “It just does.” It is as neat an encapsulation of a certain sort of managerial mindset – dogmatic, doubt-free and endlessly dangerous – that is also exactly the sort of mindset attracted to running hospitals like businesses.
The need to meet government targets to qualify as a foundation trust leads to a culture of bullying. Lesser managers berate the staff still trying to treat patients as patients rather than impediments to financial freedom. All that matters is that deadlines are not breached. Nurses’ concerns go unheeded. There is a well-conjured feeling of an encroaching nightmare in which you shout, but cannot be heard.
Down on the ward, the Baileys’ nightmare intensifies. One doctor assures them the paramedics were right, and arranges to fit Bella with a feeding tube to manage her condition. Another demands that Julie sign a “do not resuscitate” order for her mother, because “She’s going to die a painful death, just like THAT,” he says, clicking his fingers. It is one of those moments that you think must be true – you wouldn’t dare make it up.
Over the next eight weeks, Bella’s care worsens. By the time one of the staff drops her carelessly on to the bed, she is so weak it puts her into heart failure and she dies. Julie begins a campaign to expose the hospital’s behaviour – Cure the NHS – and it is her work gathering support and evidence from other bereaved people that is largely responsible for a Healthcare Commission investigation and, finally, the public inquiry whose findings hit the headlines.
The form of The Cure did not quite live up to the content. The first half coasted on the simple horror of seeing someone treated so badly by those we assume are there to protect us. And, like Responsible Child, it struggled to keep the energy going through the bureaucracy-heavy process of bringing about the investigations. Julie’s transformation from happy cafe owner to driven activist felt underpowered, and her problems with people who believed she was trying to close their local hospital or “doing down” the NHS were too lightly sketched. The tight focus did not allow much consideration of the wider issues, although most viewers will surely bring to it their own feelings and experiences about privatisation and profiting from others’ sickness. Such are the times we live in.
