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As lead surgeon in the University Hospital of Wales’s cardiac department, Dheeraj Mehta must deal with a backlog of cases and the pressures of staff shortages and ageing hospital buildings. Today, he operates on a patient at risk of a serious heart attack - retired police officer Ceri, who has waited six weeks for double bypass surgery because of the pressures on the system. To treat Ceri, Dheeraj will use an innovative ‘beating heart’ technique. Instead of placing Ceri on a bypass machine and stopping his heart, it’ll continue to beat throughout the surgery.

In the hospital’s maxillofacial department, surgeons Cellan Thomas and Drazsen Vuity must urgently operate on 69-year-old Marie, who needs a cancerous tumour removed from her jaw. In a ten-hour operation, Cellan and Drazen must remove a large section of Marie’s jaw and replace it with bone from her leg. The chance of complications both during and after the surgery is very high, but without it, Marie will not survive.

In the children’s hospital, ear, nose and throat surgeon Andy Hall is one of three consultants who fit cochlear implants. These small electronic devices enable those with severe to profound hearing loss to access sounds. The hearing of his next patient, three-year-old Phoebe, has significantly reduced over the last year, and her parents, Lee and Chelsey, want her to have the procedure to help her hearing and language development before she starts school.