Kate Garraway: Caring For Derek | Preview (ITV)

In 2020 Kate Garraway and her family wanted nothing more than to get her husband Derek back home. Little did she know what the reality of this meant.

Caring for Derek is the follow up to the award-winning ITV film Finding Derek, shown in Spring 2021, which charted how Derek Draper’s family coped while he was critically ill in hospital with Covid-19.

This time we’re with Kate and the family from the first moments Derek arrives home in April, to Christmas 2021 - a period of considerable upheaval and uncertainty. We follow Kate as she navigates the challenges of the social care system, negotiates the potential traps and unpicks the complexities that seem to be inherent in the system.

At a time when the debate about social care is at its loudest, this film goes beyond the rhetoric to explore the reality of living within and relying on the social care system today.

Kate also meets old friends Bobby and Julie, whose situation mirrors that of her own, to find out how they’re dealing with the effects of long Covid and coping with such extreme change.

And as the country crawls out of the pandemic and the government talk constantly about levelling up and building back better, Kate confronts ministers with her own frontline experiences of the care system.

Above all, this film follows Kate as she embarks on a new chapter in her marriage, trying to find a new way of living and a new way of loving, like millions of families across the country in the same boat.

Every year, countless Britons undergo the kind of seismic shift in circumstances that Kate and her family are dealing with – a life-changing injury to one person that has repercussions for every member of the family.

But the often more complicated tales of what happened next and the painstaking road to recovery remain largely untold. Until now.

Kate Garraway: Caring For Derek airs Tuesday 22nd February at 9pm on ITV.