Hospital series watching with doctors: ‘It seems as if almost everyone at an emergency department is or is depressed or has PTSD’

Patients who have a ‘flatline’ – a flat stripe on the heart monitor – and then get a heartbeat again thanks to an electric shock with a defibrillator. It often occurs in films and series that play at an Emergency Department (SEH). And is in real life. Defibrillators bring a heart that is chaotic in a normal rhythm again, but do not restore cardiac arrest.

Yara Basta (SEH doctor at the Flevo Hospital in Almere) was therefore pleasantly surprised that this infamous wrong film cliché does not occur in The Pitt. She mentions the series, which has recently been shown on HBO Max and medical staff follows an extremely busy, fictional emergency department in Pittsburgh, the best and most realistic hospital series she knows. « The amount of decisions that main character Dr. Robby (Noah Wyl) has to make one day feels very recognizable. And how this is becoming increasingly difficult for him at the end of a service, because he has already had to make thousands of choices, » Basta explains.

The Pitt is just one of the new series that play at an emergency department: recently also appeared Berlin there on Apple TV+ and will follow soon Pulse On Amazon Prime Video. What are the favorite hospital series of doctors who work themselves in an emergency room and what does they notice when they look?

Medical

Riemke Mars, in training for Emergency Assistance Arts at the UMC Groningen, tips The Residenta series about a fictional hospital in Atlanta (Netflix). « Because there is a lot of emphasis on the team event. »

As a student, Mars, just like Basta, sometimes looked at a ‘medical soap’ as Gray’s Anatomybut when seeing it she was very much bothered by the suggestion that the doctors do everything themselves. « At the same time, they are an anesthesiologist, and a surgeon, and an emergency assistance doctor, and also do the work of nurses and support staff. »

Also in The Resident Is the protagonist a doctor. “But in addition, someone we have in the Netherlands also has one Physician Assistant (PA) would mention, a major role and it is a lot about the management of the hospital, « Mars explains. » You really work at an emergency department as a team, good cooperation is very important. « 

That it also « nice interactions » The Resident Sitting, licks Riemke Mars very much; In medical series, the focus is often mainly on properly troubled doctors. Also in the episodes she saw from The Pitt the characters have a very cynical view of life and their work. « It seems as if almost everyone at an emergency department is or is depressed or has PTSD. » Working on an emergency room can indeed be really heavy, and there may be more cynicism among doctors in the US due to the health system there. But in the first episodes of The Pitt According to her, it is « extremely dramatic » with the spiritual condition of the main characters.

Emotion of care

The most famous series with a medical misanthrope and cynic is and will of course be in the lead role Houseabout the brilliant doctor house who dissolves medical mysteries. The type of series that the spoken doctors would like to follow when they were still studying. « But now I really can’t look at it anymore, » says David Baden (SEH doctor in the Diakonessenhuis in Utrecht). Partly due to the horrible behavior of house, but especially because of ‘the hint of realism that breathes the series, while it is not at all. Gray’s Anatomy« .

The disorders of the patients usually really exist, says Baden, « but how house diagnoses says is completely illogical. For example, he pokes blood and then consider that it is a certain condition. Then his assumption turns out to be incorrect and immediately does not start blood samples again. So a diagnosis does not work, then after once pricks, you do not read a genius, but can not be a genius?” ”

Baden enjoys a comedy series like Scrubsabout some young doctors in a fictional American hospital. According to him, it is clear that what the people do is medically « ridiculous », but the series is emotionally correct. « For example, that you can lose yourself too much in a patient and think that you should be the solution for someone else’s suffering. » That series also shows the extreme sides of certain figures in the hospital through enlargements. « Like a chief doctor like DR Cox, who finds himself a god. » Also M*A*S*H According to Baden, it was such a series that puts his finger on the « emotion of care » and showed how meaningless war medicine can feel. “With a series like House. Is the emotion not that important, that’s what it’s all about the puzzle. But then that puzzle turns out to be nonsense. « 

What do these doctors actually miss in medical series, except that you have to resuscitate in the event of a cardiac arrest, but should not defibrillate? Perhaps more often it should be addressed that medicine is a human work, Yara Basta thinks. And she doesn’t mean any more soapy drama or intrigues, but rather « what is the effect of enormous crowds in a waiting room on doctors, or how things sometimes end wrong or accidentally completely good. »

Riemke Mars: « Maybe we don’t have an answer to everything. Many series give people the idea that if we look hard enough, we always discover what’s going on. That’s just not. »

To share

Mail the editors