Costa, Melissa and Sam put to work for a week at one of the country's busiest and most well-known hospitals. From drug a | dHNfY3hnc091akdUY1k
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00:00Recently, our public health services hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
00:15Our health system is the sickest it's been.
00:17I would describe what's happening right now as a crisis.
00:20Our hospitals are bursting at the seams every single day.
00:24But what's it really like to work on the hospital front line?
00:29In this groundbreaking series, three Australian icons with a unique connection to the health
00:34system will go beyond the headlines to find out.
00:39Actor Samuel Johnson.
00:41Twenty-two months ago, I was hit by a car and I was in two different hospitals for about
00:46eight weeks.
00:47They were so lovely and attentive and I didn't feel their stress.
00:52That's why I'm doing this show, because surely doing this show will answer me this question,
00:57how did they hide it?
00:59Food writer and TV host Melissa Leong.
01:02My mother worked emergency and she would tell me stories of all sorts of things that would
01:07happen there.
01:09I want to dig a little deeper to think a little bit more and to feel a little bit more about
01:14what's going on.
01:15And host of Gardening Australia, Costa Georgiatis.
01:19As far as the public health system, I got a lot of connection, positive and negative,
01:25I'd had a major cardiac arrest.
01:28To walk into the hospital with him and to walk out without him, you don't forget that.
01:34They will leave behind their day jobs and spend a week alongside the frontline workers
01:39at one of Australia's busiest hospitals, St Vincent's in Sydney.
01:44I'm sweating a bit, my heart rates up.
01:47It's the first time I've seen anything like this.
01:49I'm a little bit nervous.
01:51I have been in an operating theatre exactly zero times.
01:57This is a serious, serious situation.
02:00Life is in this whole team's hands.
02:03You walk into a world thinking you half know about some things and then you walk out going
02:07I knew nothing.
02:09They will experience first hand the extraordinary challenges staff face right across the medical
02:15frontline.
02:16From the pressures of emergency medicine.
02:19Lucky there was a bed available immediately, he might have passed.
02:23To the emotional toll of treating cancer.
02:26This gives me a chance at a cure.
02:28I'm annoyed at myself because I got emotional, I've worked so hard not to do this.
02:34And the complexity of life saving operations.
02:37It's really given me an insight into how fragile health and life is.
02:43It's extraordinary, it's really extraordinary to have witnessed something like that.
02:47With an ageing population, chronic disease on the increase and costs snowballing, what
02:53will it take to ensure our public health system is fit to take on the challenges of the future?
02:58If it wasn't for the people, the frontline workers in this hospital, if it wasn't for
03:02them then I think the system would collapse.