I normally steer clear of medical dramas on telly, but was passing through the lounge the other night when one was on. Basically, lots of people were in A&E needing treatment pretty urgently for broken bits or vases on the head and stuff when suddenly a bigger, better emergency came along. Apart from a lot of running around, sirens and curiously little swearing given the circumstances, the upshot was that the original lot of patients ended up on trolleys in corridors while the staff started repairing the more seriously injured people from the exploded gasworks, or whatever it was.
Then (who would have thought it?) an even more mighty emergency occurred (plane crash, I think), trumping even the last one. The original original (yes, I did mean to write that twice) patients then ended up on benches being completely ignored and looking like they would probably just die or heal naturally before they would get treated, while the victims of the first emergency slipped down the pecking order on to the trolleys, moaning and bleeding profusely all the while, and the people from the second emergency were moved into the beds and surrounded with the hospital team furiously fighting to save their lives.
Gazing at this overcrowded, understaffed portrayal of precisely how never to get on top of a grisly and ever-worsening situation, my thoughts turned immediately and naturally not the current malaise in the NHS, but to the C&SC worksop.