OU on the BBC: A Picture of Health - Making the programme

I’m part of a team at the BBC in Bristol which specialises in making observational documentaries. In the past few years I’ve made quite a few films on health from The Big C (on cancer) and The Trouble with Men (on men’s health) to most recently Bitter Inheritance (a series following families who have genetic disorders).

This time I wanted to make a film which painted a true picture of what the NHS is like. Every day there are stories about the NHS in the papers or on the news, but to me they always seemed to concentrate either on individual errors, dry statistics, or on the endless political debates on the structure of the organisation. I didn’t feel that this sort of reporting got to the heart of our health service.

The NHS has over a million staff working in hundreds of professions in every possible part of the country. I wanted my film to have a real feel for the size and scope of this institution, yet still be told through the personal stories of the staff.

For any film maker that immediately poses a problem - how can you tie together the story of the work of a GP in Scotland with the story of a surgeon in Newcastle or a nurse in the Home Counties? To achieve this, I decided to just film on one day to take a snapshot of the NHS.

After deciding on the structure, the next step was the research. The only way to find out what it is like working in the NHS is to ask as many people as possible. So we wrote articles in the medical press and asked people to ring us or email us with stories about their jobs. And people did - in their hundreds. We also went to talk to all the health related organisations- the BMA, RCN, RCS, UNISON, DoH and every other acronym you could wish to mention.

But most important of all was the two months that our Assistant Producers, Jennie Fazey and Sophie Mead, spent travelling the length and breadth of the UK. They shadowed NHS staff going about their daily work, giving Jennie and Sophie first hand experience of what life is like in today’s NHS.

Some people run a mile at the thought of having a camera being pointed at them, but for others it feels the right thing to do, and by the end of October we had a group of people who had kindly agreed to take part on the big day.

A Picture of Health in more depth: