7 May 2025

ITV’s Malpractice is horrifying yet plausible

The second series of the medical Line of Duty asks: what’s the difference between being stretched and negligence?

The second series of Malpractice – think Line of Duty with bent doctors rather than cops – starts off a touch more quietly than the first, and for this reason, may turn out to be less preposterous than its predecessor (the first series, though extremely enjoyable, was so batshit crazy, I could only watch it when no one else was in the house). Once again, we’re in a hospital somewhere in Yorkshire. Once again, a patient dies in compromised circumstances almost immediately. This time, however, our central protagonist, James Ford (Tom Hughes) is a psychiatrist rather than an A&E doctor, and the patient in question was highly disturbed. Already, things feel more complex, and more nuanced.

Big teaching hospitals are cities unto themselves: fast-moving human traffic; so many different communities huddled together under one roof (porters, cleaners, medics, each group speaking a different language). Somehow, doctors must find – or create – moments of stillness inside all this freneticism, and never more so than if they work on a psych ward. Ford is outwardly a rather cosy figure, akin to a creative-writing teacher in appearance, with a manner that makes you think of someone who’s good with horses, or small children. The voice is heavily regulated, all drama expunged from it. But somewhere, we sense lurking tension, too – and furtiveness. His phone bleeps. His pager buzzes. Lies fall easily from his mouth.

The trouble begins when his consultant Kate McAllister (Zoe Telford) asks him to visit to help out with the sectioning under the Mental Health Act of a pregnant heroin addict, Toni (Seraphina Beh). En route to her flat, he gets another call, from a doctor in obstetrics, Sophia Hernandez (Selin Hizli). She is with a postpartum patient, Rosie (Hannah McClean) whose partner believes she isn’t coping. Can he come over and assess her? At this point, he should say no, but for reasons that are obscure, he detours, rushes through said assessment, and tells Hernandez to prescribe Rosie lorazepam for her anxiety. After this, he’s out the door. With help from the police, Toni’s soon in a safe place.

Or is it? Cut to the night-time. Ford is in bed, but he’s on call. The phone rings. In the hospital, an emergency. Rosie, the woman he saw earlier, is now in full-blown crisis, biting ambulance staff and hearing voices. Her husband says she tried to drown her baby. Again, Ford uses that voice of his, not quite a whisper. He removes her restraints, she calms down. A bed will be found for her, and soon all will be well.

I won’t say what happens next. It’s horrifying, and yet plausible. You feel for Ford, until you grasp that he was breaking the rules by sleeping more than 30 minutes from the hospital, at which point you reconsider his brisk first encounter with Rosie, the way he couldn’t resist the siren calls of his devices. What’s the difference between being stretched and negligence? It’s in the space between the two that Malpractice’s writer, Grace Ofori-Attah, must work, setting long hours against honesty, the heat of the moment against training. I think she’s good at this. And she knows, too, that personality clashes are as likely to happen in a hospital as in any office or school. As kind and dedicated as nurses and doctors mostly are, scrubs, stethoscopes and swinging lanyards should not be taken as symbols of saintliness. Ford and Hernandez, it’s clear, absolutely loathe one another.

My only reservation (so far) has to do with George (Jordan Kouamé) and Norma (Helen Behan), who work for the Medical Investigations Unit, and who are about to ask Ford an awful lot of questions. In real life, I’m sure such people are relatively low-key, padding along corridors with their clipboards. But this is television, not real life! For all their protestations of getting to the facts, they seem almost bored during interviews, as if they can hardly wait to feed coins into the nearest vending machine. (“Mars Bar or Boost, George?”) You long for the sighs and disappointed head shakes of Superintendent Ted Hastings, for the zombie eyeballing of DS Steve Arnott and DC Kate Fleming. Oh, well. In spite of this, Malpractice is still a pretty good watch, and in any case, the major news is that Line of Duty will be back some time quite soon.

Malpractice
ITV