Radio Times: Review by:; Alison Graham

A consultant quietly tells the parents of an ailing four-year-old: “I’m not sure we can fix this.” Their daughter has gone through so much major surgery, including bowel and liver transplants, and is yet again dangerously ill. Her only, slight hope lies with more transplants, but her medical team feel she can’t cope with the trauma.

Another child, a one-year-old, cannot breathe unaided and has never left the hospital. Throughout the episode the hospital staff wonder aloud at the fairness and point of keeping children alive by machine. Says one: “We are developing a population of children who are technologically dependent.”

About this programme

4/6. Colin Wallis, Andy Petros and Paula Lister, doctors in the hospital's intensive care and respiratory departments, face difficult decisions about the futures of youngsters who are dependent on technology to keep them alive. In consultation with the patients' parents, they must determine whether to continue treatment if there is no prospect of the children's conditions improving. Among those whose cases they consider are a one-year-old girl who forgets to breathe when she sleeps, a 12-year-old with cerebral palsy and severe spinal curvature, and a four-year-old who has been rushed to intensive care with multiple organ failure.