THIS column is going to be more serious this week because I have spent a few hours in the A&E department at the Great Western Hospital.

We tend to only hear about what goes on there when something goes wrong, so I feel privileged to have got a ringside view of a seemingly typical Friday evening there – and thankfully without the inconvenience of being a patient myself.

My wife and I were there because our Auntie Jean, who is in her nineties, had been brought in by ambulance.

With a painful bump, two black eyes and bruising down her face, it looked like the old ladies at the luncheon club had taken up boxing, and we weren’t the only people to remark that she looked like she had gone ten rounds with Frank Bruno.

In fact, she had had a fall and bumped her head.

Auntie Jean’s injuries turned out to be thankfully less serious than they looked, but I dare say there were other people there with urgent, worrying and perhaps life-threatening problems, and although the place was a hive of activity and every cubicle was occupied, the overriding atmosphere was one of calm.

As anybody knows, there is often a lot of waiting around for patients while they are processed in A&E, and if you only took notice of the negative experiences people have had there, you might think they get forgotten.

Our experience could not have been further from this perception.

Although one of many patients, we lost count of the number of times Auntie Jean was spoken to during the two or three hours she was there.

For instance, when the ambulance service staff who had brought her in returned with a new patient and had a few minutes to wait, they stopped by to see how she was getting on.

Various nurses also checked on her, and asked if she needed or wanted anything, including a sandwich. And when all the patients were handed over to the next shift, three nurses came over to make sure everybody was properly briefed.

Even we were looked after, with a senior nurse going off to fetch chairs.

After Auntie Jean was collected by a friendly porter and taken off for a scan (which came with two different apologies for it taking longer than expected) not one but two occupational therapists came over to chat and carry out tests that made sure she could be safely discharged, before we were sent off with instructions for keeping a close eye on her over the next 24 hours.

With all the different colour-coded uniforms for everybody from the porters and cleaners, through the ambulance and nursing staff, to the various doctors, it’s not easy for the observer to work out who is who in A&E and who does what.

But everybody knew what they were doing and they not only did it expertly and efficiently but also cheerfully, and if anybody wasn’t directly involved in a specific task at any one time, they were looking around for something else to do or a way of helping or reassuring their “customers”.

Best of all: they add up to more than the sum of their parts, because I don’t think I have seen better teamwork since Brazil won the World Cup in 1970.

The NHS is not perfect because, after all, we don’t live in a perfect world, and we all have opinions on how the service could be improved.

But if anybody tells me the people in the front line aren’t doing amazing things under intense and often unfair and unreasonable pressure, then they had better have a liking for hospital food.