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Hospital drama can be confronting, as Evonne Barry finds when she joins the RPA camera crew on location
GETTING up close and personal is the business of the production crew filming the medical-reality television series, RPA.
With an eighth series of the award-winning program going to air next month, the Guide took a behind-the-scenes look at how and why the stories of patients and staff at Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred hospital are such great television material.
One patient about whom viewers at home will learn more is plucky eight-year-old Matthew Devine.
Matthew had a life-changing operation to correct a rare muscular condition called torticollis.
The condition drew his head to one side and sadly made him the butt of cruel schoolyard jibes.
When his parents were approached to appear on RPA, Kristen and Matthew Sr were quick to realise how the hospital could ease their son's pain, both in and out of the school playground.
"We were a little bit apprehensive, as any parent would be, but Matt's been building up to it like birthdays or Christmas," dad Matthew says on the morning of surgery.
"He's been jumping off the walls," Kristen says. "I've never seen anybody so excited about an operation.
"He says nobody will be able to call him names any more. And he's been telling everyone he's going to be on TV."
From his mother's teary goodbye outside the theatre to the delicacy of the surgeon's work, Matthew's hospital experience is caught on film.
He, like all those patients before him, was chosen carefully.
RPA executive producer Danny Milosavljevic, who also works as a field producer, relies on the doctors to double as talent scouts as well as program stars.
At the beginning of each season he and others talk to their network of doctors.
"We give them a kind of wish list, but at the end of the day, you wait and see what comes along," Milosavljevic says.
"Whatever happens we're allowed to...