Season 5 - Episode Guide

The city's new state-of-the-art hospital remains unfinished, three years after it was due to open, so two of the biggest hospital trusts are planning an ambitious merger. But this means that hundreds of patients and staff have to be transported across the city, while all the operating theatres bar one are closed.

At Aintree Hospital's major trauma centre, a 15-strong team try to save the life of a young man who has arrived by emergency helicopter. He has been stabbed in the chest - one of three stabbings to arrive during the day. Across the city at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, staff deal with a homeless man who has been returning for at least 18 years. He is always treated with patience and dignity and given somewhere to sleep his alcohol or substance misuse. However, his increasingly aggressive behaviour leads to him being issued with an ultimatum.

Eighty-one-year-old Joe has been left with a hole in his heart after suffering a heart attack, and face a complex procedure that carries a high-mortality rate. Ellie, 28, is one of the growing population of adults with congenital heart disease, who had devices fitted into their hearts as children, and need further procedures as they get older. Already cancelled twice before, she hopes that this time her operation to replace her pulmonary valve with keyhole surgery will go ahead, so she can begin to plan her wedding to Jade.

The documentary returns to follow the day-to-day realities the NHS faces in tackling the coronavirus pandemic, following staff and patients at London's Royal Free Trust from the first day of the lockdown. The Royal Free Hospital's emergency department is inundated with patients displaying symptoms, among them 88-year-old Peter, who is struggling for breath. He is quickly put on oxygen and moved to what was the coronary care unit, but has now become a ward for covid-positive patients.

The second of two programmes following hospital staff treating Covid-19 cases features patients who are on dialysis or who have recently had a transplant, and as such are among the most vulnerable to the virus. Royal Free London faces a near catastrophic breakdown of oxygen supply, while an infectious diseases consultant starts a trial of an anti-viral drug used in the treatment of Ebola.