Nurses Onscreen
Critical: Between Life and Death
(Netflix, 2025)
Critical: Between Life and Death is a six-episode documentary streaming series that follows high-stakes medical cases in London’s trauma centers.
TACTICAL OPERATIONS CENTER
To handle the care needs in a city of 10 million people, where there’s a serious accident or life-threatening emergency every hour, the English National Health Service has established what’s called London’s Major Trauma System (LMTS). This divides the capital into four quadrants, each with its own trauma center.
Operators in a centralized dispatch unit called the Tactical Operations Center answer emergency calls, and then coordinate ambulance and helicopter units to get patients to the nearest trauma center equipped to treat their specific type of injuries. The goal is for treatment to begin within 15 minutes of the incident.
London tactical operators have a grid map of the city showing the location of each incident and the route to the hospital. They alert the hospitals about the number and arrival times of incoming patients. It all seems very efficient:
Patients go where they will get the best treatment, with no turf battles between hospitals.
NO GUNSHOT WOUNDS
The show follows LMTS operators and care teams at the four trauma centers (Royal London, King’s College, St. Mary’s, and St. George’s) over a period of 21 days, using dozens of embedded cameras. Each of the six hour-long episodes follows patients who have suffered life-threatening injuries.
Many of the cases involve young men, from their teens through their 40s. Some have dangerous occupations, while some were partaking of risky behavior, like hopping a fence and losing a finger.
There are some freak accidents, like carnival rides going off the rails into the crowd, and some nasty fights, with people getting their heads stomped outside pubs.
Traffic accidents are also frequent, but despite a mention of “bullet trajectory” in an early teaser, there are no gunshot wounds.
RANGE OF CARE
The expertise of the care teams we see on the show is impressive. When one surgeon says “This man’s bones have exploded,” he seems to know exactly how to fix the situation.
I was also impressed by the range of care provided. Many of the teams include plastic surgeons, who do their best to not only save patients’ lives, but also repair their appearance, even after crushing head injuries.
A SYSTEM THAT WORKS
We see the care teams providing great emotional support as well.
In one episode, a young man suffers a major head injury that leads to personality changes, leaving his mother ill-prepared to care for him at home. The hospital resources work with the patient and the family to bridge the gap.
I particularly appreciated that the physicians repeatedly emphasize the value of their whole team. The patients also seem to understand that it’s not only the doctor who has helped them, but an entire group of people, beginning with the ambulance attendants.
At one point, we hear from a nurse who says, “We do all the work.”
Apparently, even in a completely different country with a very different health system, some things never change!
Although Critical is grisly even by my strong-stomach standards, I was glued to my screen. It was fascinating to see how medicine could really be practiced if the insurance company’s bottom line did not define the variables of care.
CHRISTINE CONTILLO, RN, BSN, PHN, is a public health nurse with more than 40 years of experience, ranging from infants to geriatrics.
In this Article: Emergency
