• PROGRAMME
• SYNOPSES
• JURY
• AWARDS
• CALL FOR ENTRIES

Great Ormond Street: Pushing the Boundaries

1. Author: Ricardo Pollack
2. Editor: Joe Carey
3. Photography: Petra Graf, Graham Day
4. Music: Miguel D’Oliveira
5. Production: Films of Record
6. United Kingdom
7. 59 min.
8. 2010

Great Ormond Street Hospital is regarded as a world centre of excellence in child healthcare. The documentary features unprecedented access to the doctors of the cardiac unit as they make some of the hardest choices in medicine. For the first time on television, cameras follow them into the meetings where they come face-to-face with the most difficult ethical dilemmas on a daily basis.
M. Elliott and V. Tsang perform extremely advanced surgery that isn't carried out anywhere else in the UK, and the team's success rate for heart transplant is well above the international average.
The video documents the stories of four children: the parents of 8-month-old Aicha, given only a few months to live, refuse to accept the team's decision that there's nothing else to be done; 8-month-old Natalie's parents are offered surgery that might save their daughter's life, but the procedure is very complex and has never been tried before; 9-year-old Bryan has already had several life-saving heart operations but now a high-risk heart transplant is all that's left to him; and Blessing's parents must decide whether to agree to a perilous operation on their daughter when she is only 2 days old.
Through these stories the film explores when it's right to treat a child. As surgeon Martin Elliott says: "Just because we can, doesn't mean we should…. But the experience we gain from doing the complex surgery can benefit a lot of other patients within the same specialty”.