The show focused on the lives and challenges of junior doctors working in a hospital setting and was known for its realistic and sometimes dark portrayal of the medical profession.

Mercurio is a British writer and television producer and, before pursuing a career in writing, he worked as a doctor in a hospital in Wolverhampton.

He is also required to do a three-day and night shift on call, while Claire tries to shield him from his worst abuses in order to preserve his sanity.

At the organisational level, a new hospital administrator, Paul Tennant (Nicholas Palliser), demands even more efficiency from the medical staff, which places Andrew on ENT (ear, nose and throat) duties even though he has no training for the skills required.

The hospital soon attracts additional adverse publicity when the anaesthetist Dr James Mortimer (Jo Dow) is diagnosed with HIV, following a discovery that he has a Kaposi's sarcoma, but he is still permitted to work.

The diagnosis is leaked to the media and a scandal ensues, and manager Paul Tennant (Nicholas Palliser) pressures James to take a leave of absence.

He takes the full blame and denies that he sought Turner's opinion, but the inquest returns a finding of unlawful killing.

The hospital has another new house officer, Dr Liz Reid (Caroline Trowbridge), who is constant trouble and Claire (who is now rehired as a registrar) shows little respect for her.

Phil, now a surgical house officer, faces continual taunting from his new boss Mr Adrian DeVries (Jack Fortune).

After Tennant is reinstated, he attempts to have Julie's new partner, Scissors Smedley, fired over procedural errors he committed when asking a student nurse to administer medication to a critically ill child.

James's HIV infection affects Andrew, who had begun an affair with staff nurse Caroline Richards (Jayne MacKenzie): her ex-lover Luke (Terry Sue-Patt) was also a partner of James, and Luke had tested positive for HIV, putting Caroline at risk.

Adrian DeVries's son, Steven (Christopher Woodger), the result of a past relationship with Sister Debbie Pereira (Gabrielle Cowburn), is brought in seriously injured after being hit by a car.

Andrew is rescued by the casualty team, including newly reunited Claire and Scissors, and they head towards the resuscitation room, ending the series.

James is later falsely accused of child abuse after a man who recognised him from media coverage of his infection sees him feeling for a pulse in his son's leg.

Consultants are mostly portrayed as callous and uncaring towards matters of patients and their own staff such as junior doctors, nurses and house officers.

Early in the first series Mr Docherty is portrayed as pleasant and cheerful, but also bumbling and incompetent, frequently requiring to be rescued by Monica.

Dr Yates is portrayed as a sympathetic character who, in stark contrast to Turner, genuinely supports his juniors and stays behind to assist them, and more than once is vocal in his opposition to management's tendency to look for a scapegoat for patient deaths caused by systemic flaws.

The Series 1 hospital manager is uncaring and dismissive, even of Andrew's most desperate complaints of abuse: In Series 2 and 3, Tennant is primarily interested in protecting his own job, and that of his ally Dr Turner, and in improving hospital metrics such as outpatient waiting times, rather than improving working conditions for staff, or care for patients.

They are frequently shown as gossiping, conniving women, chatting at the nurses' station while ill patients languish without attention, or Andrew fumbles around, hopelessly busy and in great need of assistance.

One of these is Charge Nurse Patrick "Hanging" Garden (Peter Biddle), although he has his moments of being portrayed negatively, especially during the second series, where he is one of the most unsympathetic towards James and opines that the latter should be sacked.

In common with other medical dramas, (such as The House of God or even M*A*S*H), Cardiac Arrest portrays junior hospital medicine as an unending parade of sexual adventure for the staff, partly because longer-term relationships are placed under enormous stress by their working hours.

At the end of the first series Docherty directly addresses the question of hazing practices in medical training when Betancourt tries to defend his treatment of Monica by saying that he went through a similar process.

It had envisaged creating a sitcom set in a hospital, but when Jed Mecurio responded to its advertisement for a writer the show became a portrait of the NHS from the perspective of junior doctors.

[4][5] The critical response to the series was generally positive; it was twice nominated for Best Original TV Drama Series/Serial by the Writers' Guild of Great Britain and twice in the same category by BAFTA Scotland.

In 1994, the British Medical Journal concluded that, "newly qualified house officers have been falsely accused of increasing the number of deaths in hospital and that the idea of the killing season is very much fiction.