People who work in real-life emergency rooms have raved about how the new TV drama “The Pitt” accurately captures the complex dynamics of their workplaces and the medical details of their cases.
Host Dan Weissmann talks with Alex Janke, an emergency medicine doctor and health policy researcher, about how the show stacks up against his experiences in the ER. They also discuss its depictions of the financial forces that shape day-to-day problems inside ERs.
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Transcript: Why ‘The Pitt’ Is Our Fave New Drama
Note: “An Arm and a Leg” uses speech-recognition software to generate transcripts, which may contain errors. Please use the transcript as a tool but check the corresponding audio before quoting the podcast.
Dan: Hey there. I’ve got a new favorite TV show: “The Pitt.” I signed up for HBO — Max, whatever –thats what my editor says I’m supposed to call it. The show takes place in a Pittsburgh emergency room, and the first season follows the staff through a single, jam-packed day, hour by hour. It’s riveting. Noah Wyle, who got famous playing a young doctor on the show ER in the 1990s, stars here as the senior doc on duty. And people who work in emergency rooms say it gets a lot of things right, including medical details that fly past most of us in scenes like this…
Doctor 1: Bring me up to speed?
Doctor 2: Intubated for agonal respirations. GCS five, probably anticoagulated. Doctor 1: With what?
Doctor 3: First time here. There’s no medical records.
Doctor 1: Call for FFP.
Doctor 2: No, we got four factors…
Dan: And yeah, I basically did not catch any of that. But when I played it for an actual ER doctor, Alex Janke, he kept smiling and nodding along. In any case, tho …