The final episode looks at the costly consequences of Britain’s increasingly obese teens. At Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham, younger and younger patients are being referred for help in tackling their weight and, increasingly, they are asking for a gastric band. While doctors and dieticians see the £6,000 operation as a last resort, some patients seek them as an “easy” solution to their weight problem. But the NHS weight management clinics can only help those who help themselves, and health professionals are hampered by young patients who don’t tell them the truth about what they are eating.

Tuesday 21 April 2009
9:00pm, Channel 4

This second episode looks at the cost of teenage mothers to an already stretched NHS. The UK has the highest number of teenage mothers in Europe: there were 46,000 last year across the UK. The government has a strategy to reduce the numbers but at City Hospital in Birmingham 10 new pregnant teenage girls a week register at the maternity unit. And teenage pregnancies are neither straightforward nor cheap.

Tuesday 14 April 2009
9:00pm, Channel 4

This new Channel 4 series was filmed in the accident and emergency wards of two Midlands hospitals and last night’s episode highlighted the teenagers who come into A&E with alcohol-related injuries that are pushing NHS staff to the limits of their endurance on a weekly basis.

For the doctors and nurses on the frontline who are left to pick up the pieces of a generation that some are calling a health time-bomb, there are no easy answers… however, consultant Naomi Cuthbert gave me the impression that she’d ship off the ‘sub-set of society’ as she called some of her patients to an island somewhere and leave them there… Read more & comment »

Today’s teenagers are drinking too much, having children too young and getting so fat that some commentators have predicted they will have a lower life expectancy than their parents’ generation. In this three-part series examining the relationship between teenagers and the NHS, consultants, surgeons, nurses, midwives and other staff at every level speak with unprecedented candour about the problems they face. The first episode, filmed in the A&E wards of two Midlands hospitals, shows how the seriously ill now have to compete with the casualties of a binge-drinking epidemic.