The traumas of casualty departments

Trauma care in Britain came in for a battering last week when the BBC's science programme QED screened a drama purporting to show a real life case of medical negligence. Christopher Bulstrode examines the controversy surrounding Cause of Death

Mark was just a nice, ordinary lad on a big motorbike that crashed. He was fine when he got to the hospital, apart from a few broken bones, but then things started to go wrong. Within a few days he was in the intensive treatment unit after a cardiac arrest. His brain never recovered, and when they switched off the ventilator the family was left devastated. …