Interview: Walsall doctor who advises on BBC's Casualty
Casualty has kept audiences gripped for 30 years with its plot twists and love triangles, but who stops medical fiction becoming a farce?
From explosions to crashes with a heavy dose of drama, TV show Casualty keeps viewers glued to their TV screens – and Walsall consultant Doctor Dan O'Carroll busy on a factual front.
Dr O'Carroll, who works in the emergency department (ED) at Walsall Manor Hospital, is one of the show's medical advisers, a role he has enjoyed for more than four years.
His expertise is called on to help the scriptwriters accurately portray the various stages of patients' conditions and ensure procedures that are carried out in the show reflect the types of procedures teams in ED are involved in.
He said: "It could be a scenario where there's been a helicopter crash and the scriptwriters want to show a patient's deterioration en-route to ED.
"While the audience wants to be entertained and enjoy the tense moments of whether or not someone's going to pull through, it is important to correctly describe the different stages of that situation.
"This may be anything from making sure the vital signs readings stated would be typical for the state of health being depicted up to the dialogue characters would use while attempting resuscitation.
"The scriptwriters have their idea of how they want a storyline to play out and need this medical expertise to make the scenes credible – as well as the general public Casualty is watched by a huge number of NHS staff who face life and death situations daily."
The role of a medical advisor only rarely involves trips to the studio in Cardiff where Casualty is filmed and is a mainly telephone and email based job.
Each script goes through five drafts before a 'shooting script' can be issued.
Medical advisors read all but one of these, make notes to try and keep the medicine on the right track, as well as occasionally suggesting medical dialogue to be used within the 50-minute episode.
The show is the longest-running emergency medical drama on television and is broadcast every Saturday night with only the occasional break for special events and one over the summer.
It regularly attracts more than five million viewers.
Dr O'Carroll, who has worked with the Walsall Healthcare NHS trust for 15 months, works on scripts up to 18 months in advance of transmission and is sworn to secrecy over the many plot twists which keep viewers hooked since its first episode aired on September 6, 1986.
This can prove problematic for Dr O'Carroll, who faces a grilling from colleagues eager to find out what is going to happen next, but he maintains he doesn't divulge information.
He said: "In the 30th anniversary episodes when the viewers were wondering if Connie Beauchamp and her daughter Grace would survive following a car crash into a ravine, my colleagues were all desperate to know what was going to happen. There was a gap between episodes because of the Rio Olympics being shown but I didn't breathe a word."
The father-of three, who lives in Harborne, has been on to the Casualty set in Bristol and has met the stars of the show, including Derek Thompson who plays Charlie Fairhead and Amanda Mealing who plays Connie.
He said that outside of being an entertaining watch for viewers at home, it also helps to raise awareness of issues within the medical world that can otherwise go ignored or suffer from a lack of exposure. The 43 year old said: "Casualty is a drama and is meant to be entertaining, but there's no doubt it has helped to raise awareness of important issues such as Female Genital Mutilation and mental health."
Earlier this year, the show celebrated reaching its 1,000th episode milestone, which landed on the 39th episode of its 30th series.
It won its first major award in 2007, picking up the BAFTA for best continuing drama, which was accepted by Ian Bleasdale, who played paramedic Josh Griffiths.
After collecting the award he said: "The doctors, nurses and ambulance crews, thank you for doing the job you do.
"I hope we go some way to showing exactly what it is."
Dr O'Carroll said he 'really enjoys' his role and has revealed which star actor he thinks would make a good fit for the show – it might not be who you would think.
He said: "I really enjoy being a medical adviser and would like to think I'll get a script in future that casts actor Jason Statham in a scene.
"That would be pretty interesting."
Exterior shots for the show were mainly filmed outside the Ashley Down Centre in Bristol from 1986 until 2002 when they moved to the centre of Bristol for just over nine years.
In 2011 Casualty celebrated its 25th birthday and following that, for the Bristol finale, they filmed the emergency department catching fire and subsequently exploding.
After 25 years in Bristol, Casualty moved to its new home at the Roath Lock Studios in Cardiff where it is currently filmed.
The process for each episode begins with 'commissioning', where a writer presents their ideas and is engaged to work on a particular episode. Involvement for advisors usually begins after this, with a series of telephone calls and emails trying to sort out the medicine for each character.
Casualty has produced many memorable TV moments over the years, and it is the knowledge of people like Dr O'Carroll that keep them believable, too.
