The Surgery—an insider's view

“So what's it like being filmed?” That's what I kept hearing from fellow professionals during my brief spell in the limelight as one of the doctors featured in The Surgery, a three part documentary shown on Channel 4's Cutting Edge series in April.

It all began early last year, when we were approached by Touch Productions, which had been commissioned to make a documentary about general practice. They wanted to focus on the pressures on general practice, including the recruitment crisis, out of hours stresses, and the ways that the locus of control of health funding is shifting into primary care. They thought that the stress would be most acute in an inner city, and our practice fitted the bill.

Once they arrived, and the researcher and production team got to know a bit more about us they …