There's a tragicomic moment in the hit TV series The Pitt when attending emergency physician Michael "Robby" Robinavitch almost gets a moment of relief, but he's interrupted when yet another trauma case is wheeled onto the ward.
"It's just so true to life," says Samina Ali, who knows from her work as a practising pediatric emergency physician at the Stollery Children's Hospital, professor of pediatrics and adjunct professor of emergency medicine. She's also married to an emergency doc who had a much different reaction to the show.
"Sometimes you literally can't heed your bodily functions — like, "I'm thirsty" and "I need to pee" — because you're on your way to the bathroom and someone calls a critical patient to the resuscitation room. Your body shuts it all down and just keeps going."
The Crave series depicts a 15-hour shift at a Pittsburgh emergency department, following Robby and a cast of nurses, residents and medical students as they handle the chaos of cases ranging from life-threatening (heart attacks, overdoses, stab wounds and acute diseases) to absurd (an angry girlfriend glues a dog collar to her boyfriend's neck as he sleeps).
The show scores 95 per cent on the Tomatometer and has 13 nominations for Emmy Awards, to be handed out in Los Angeles this weekend.
The show is already a winner among those who actually work in Canadian emergency rooms and teaching hospitals.
"It got so much buzz about how realistic it was purported to be that it really made me want to watch it," says Nicole Harley, an award-winning clinical nursing professor who used to work in local emergency departments and just finished binge-watching the show.
After giving The Pitt a reality check, here's what these two University of Alberta experts have to say about which parts of the show truly reflect a day in the life of a teaching and trauma hospital — and which ones are just a little too Hollywood for real life.
The pace is fast and the trauma is real … but there's also a lot more paperwork.
Actor Noah Wyle, who plays Robby, had previous "medical" experience as a rookie on TV's ER 30 years ago, but he told the Canadian podcast The Skeptics' Guide to Emergency Medicine that The Pitt gets the details right more often than the '90s show did.
The Pitt producers consulted with medical expert Mel Herbert, creator of EM:RAP (Emergency Medicine Reviews and Perspectives), and it even won the seal of approval from Wyle's mom, who worked as an ER nurse.
More than 100 patients are treated during the course of the show. And though the balance of trauma to non-acute cases is higher than in a real emergency department, says Ali, the volume and intensity are realistic.
"From the patient perspective, nobody wakes up in the morning expecting to go to the ER, so they are having one of the toughest days of their lives, whether the problem is little or big, and we have to be present for it all," says Ali, research director and principal investigator for the Pediatric Emergency: Advancing Knowledge (PEAK) Research Team and chair of Pediatric Emergency Research Canada.
One thing Ali is firm on is that there's a lot more (digital) paperwork to be done than is depicted on the show.
"That waiting room doesn't look much different from our waiting rooms at the Stollery these days, and when it's backed up like that we often push our documentation until after hours, because it would paralyze the department if we did it any other way," she says.
Students get to try everything.
Nicole Harley regularly takes groups of nursing students onto medicine, surgery and mental health wards at local hospitals, and some may also get practical experience in emergency departments later in their training.
These clinical placements are the students' chance to practise all the things they've learned in lectures and labs, and they take full advantage, whether it's putting in a catheter, starting an IV or giving narcotic medications.
"We really do try to support students in working to their full scope at whatever level they're at, and that changes weekly," Harley says. "It's the best way for them to develop and grow. And we make sure they do it safely."
