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ABC News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
The Pitt medical drama could easily be set in an Australian emergency room
I don't usually set my friends homework before I agree to catch up with them, but I had questions — many, detailed questions, and only someone who worked in the emergency room of a public hospital was going to be able to answer them. And to do that, my highly skilled, incredibly busy friend Nadine was going to have to sit down and watch all 15 episodes of The Pitt. The series depicts 15 hours of one shift in an under-funded, overcrowded emergency department of a Pittsburgh hospital, and it's the co-creation of the star, writer and co-producer of ER, the most famous TV emergency room of all: the actor Noah Wyle, R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells. The Pitt is riveting, real and unsentimental television, set in a time of fentanyl abuse, a national bed crisis and assaults against health workers. It's been lauded by many US emergency doctors as the most realistic medical drama ever. Watching it you ask yourself one question over and over — is this how it really is? Is this happening here in Australia? I needed my friend to answer this for me. Nadine is a specialist in one of the best-known emergency departments in the country. She has had the almost unbearable task of dealing with the aftermath of some of our most significant public tragedies. The day we made our plan to meet she had just finished a "rotten day: six trauma cases in the space of two-and-a-half hours." By the time we sat together for dinner, almost everyone she knew in her field had told Nadine she had to watch the show, and finally she did. In one go. Her verdict? "It's everything you ever see in emergency medicine all crammed into one day. And it's absolutely true." Nobody in Australia who enjoys this incredibly well-written and brilliantly acted show will want to recognise any elements in our publicly funded system, of which we enjoy being proud. The US hospital comparison is one we only ever make to land the point about the importance of our universal, public coverage. But increasingly, our intensivists, doctors and nurses will tell you that the experience is becoming the same. My friend talks of families of six children arriving early to her emergency room, clearly unable to afford or secure the multiple GP visits they need. The room is crowded by 11am and stays that way, with many cases better suited to the primary care that families can't afford. Noah Wyle, who played young doctor John Carter on ER, has said that one of the key differences between his time on ER and now, and one of the reasons he decided to revisit the subject, is that in 1994 around 40 million Americans were without health insurance and relied on emergency departments for primary health care; that figure, he says, has now doubled. This week both the ABC and the Nine newspapers have highlighted emergency department waiting times and bed shortages in NSW and Victorian public hospitals: wait times of up to 88 hours, no beds for admissions and deaths in EDs of untreated patients. Workforce shortages have forced mental health services to close and left staff struggling to keep the system functioning. All the while, primary care in this country has taken a beating. The Royal Australasian College of GPs has argued over the years that governments have tended to direct more funding to hospitals and emergency services rather than investing in primary care, despite strong evidence that primary care reduces hospital demand. According to the Productivity Commission, the average cost to the government when a patient visits an emergency department is $692 compared to $82.90 for 20 to 40 minutes with their GP for early diagnosis and preventative care. But you need enough GPs in clinics to make that a reality, and you need to fund Medicare well enough to make it worth the while of being a GP, which is one of the most important, complex and unsung roles in the medical system. Anyone who is lucky enough to have a good GP, and have them over the decades of their life, will attest. During the election campaign, the Albanese government promised an injection of $8.5 billion into Medicare, but GPs argue that the focus, and money, needs to be on funding longer consults for patients who increasingly have co-morbidities and complex health conditions that a bulk-billed 15-minute consult can't solve. The government wants "nine out of 10 visits to the GP to be free" but with complex medical needs, this won't help cover costs for a doctor's visit that will keep you out of the emergency room. If you have had the unfortunate need to turn up to an emergency department, I hope that like so many others you came away amazed and grateful for the generally excellent care that our public hospitals provide. If you get to see someone like my friend Nadine and her colleagues, you will be in exceptionally good hands. I just hope you don't find that you have to go see her because, in Australia in 2025, you can't afford to go anywhere else. This weekend, if medical dramas are your thing, check out The Pitt or read about how to remove the burr under the saddle of so many relationships — dividing household chores. If you can't afford a doctor, you won't be able to afford a cleaner. Have a safe and happy weekend and with the magical and otherworldly singer Marlon Williams in the country, have a listen to his latest album, Te Whare Tīwekaweka, performed in Maori. Here, he is collaborating with the singer Lorde. It's simply beautiful. Go well. Virginia Trioli is presenter of Creative Types and a former co-host of ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.
South China Morning Post
17-05-2025
- Health
- South China Morning Post
Hong Kong children urged to get Covid jabs as ‘whole paediatric ward full'
The head of a paediatric infectious diseases unit at a Hong Kong public hospital has said his ward is now full of young, unvaccinated Covid-19 patients, urging parents to get their children inoculated to prevent severe symptoms. Mike Kwan Yat-wah warned on Saturday that the number of children with Covid-19 had risen significantly recently. 'As a frontline paediatrician, I now notice the number of Covid-19 cases is large,' Kwan, who is also president of the Asian Society for Paediatric Infectious Diseases, told a radio programme. 'Before, our ward had no patients with Covid-19, now the whole ward is full of children with Covid cases. Some of them are not severe, but they had a high fever of 39 degrees Celsius for two to three days.' He added that none of the children had received Covid vaccines. Consultant Mike Kwan says Covid-17 vaccines are very safe. Photo: Jonathan Wong Kwan urged all parents to take their children to receive jabs, which were 'very safe', as those who contracted the virus for the first time might become severely ill.
Mail & Guardian
08-05-2025
- Health
- Mail & Guardian
Confessions of a medical student
Medical students are not prepared for the reality of working in a hospital with few resources and death a regular companion. Photo: Envato I was 21 the first time a patient of mine died. It wasn't like Grey's Anatomy . There were no moments of silence, no beeping flatlines in the background and no weeping family members outside the door. It was cold and matter of fact. The intern looked at me and said, 'There's a hundred more in the waiting room, so you better get moving.' I didn't understand why no one seemed to care. I felt hopeless. The doctors moved mechanically to call the family. The nurses followed protocol. Ward work continued as usual. Someone added 'demise' to the whiteboard. Someone else shrugged, noting the patient had advanced HIV anyway. Later, when I asked one of the doctors how they could move on so quickly, they explained it wasn't a lack of care — it was self-preservation. That was just the reality. Healthcare workers don't deal with death, they separate themselves from it. This might seem heartless, but I think it is the only way they are able to go about their days. The beds and wards and passages are filled with death and sickness, and to not step away is to allow yourself to become enshrouded by it. Death becomes a part of the job, a cog in the machine. Working in a public hospital with way too few resources punches you in the gut every day. It's not just the trauma of seeing your patient die — it's having no gloves in a delivery room; no alcohol swabs to clean wounds; and knowing that nurses stop at the shop on their way to work to buy their own gloves and masks because the clinic has run out. Where waiting times for a scan are months long and surgery delays needlessly let disease progress to the point of being inoperable. It's the limited beds in high care that mean doctors are regularly forced to decide whose life is worth saving more because there's only space for one. As students, we're never truly prepared for this. We're expected to know all the theory. Every system. Every drug. We deal with death as an academic topic. Our palliative care lectures teach us about prescribing morphine in the terminal stages of cancer, and we learn what happens when body tissue dies. But we never deal with how it feels to spend every day in the face of death amidst a failing system. No one teaches us how to navigate our own grief. No one prepares us to be resilient in the face of moral distress, to speak out from within a toxic hierarchy or how to balance this kind of work with life outside of the hospital. We aren't taught how to brush off the demeaning comments from seniors, or how to cope with feeling stupid on a ward round no matter how much extra reading you do. It's funny — you think you know these things. After all, plenty of people have told you that medicine is difficult. Perhaps I should've listened more carefully. Medicine is difficult. But not in an abstract way. It's difficult in a very tangible, concrete way. It demands enormous sacrifice. It chips away at you. It burns you out before you've even begun. It forces you to be constantly surrounded by suffering. It's hard because you know the system will never change and that it will be hard forever. And yet, there are moments. Moments of humanity. Moments that remind me what a privilege it is to be where I am. In the middle of a rant about a hard day, my mom will reliably tell me how lucky I am to be a medical student. Usually, I find this frustrating and enraging. But deep down, I know she is right. How many twenty-somethings get to witness a baby's first breath? Or see the inside of a living body? Or watch a psychotic patient slowly regain clarity? Last year, during my internal medicine rotation, I had a quiet night on call. I spent most of it with one patient, an elderly man admitted in a delirious state. He was confused for most of the night, but I had time so I stayed with him. I checked in on him often and chatted with him when I could. In the morning, during the ward round, he told the senior doctor that I was the best doctor in the whole world. Of course, I was mortified, given that I was just a student. I hadn't done much at all (and besides he was still probably a little delirious). That patient will stay with me forever. He reminded me of the real value of being a healthcare practitioner. I didn't really treat him, but I made him feel cared for. And that made a difference. But if I am honest, I hate medicine more often than not and cannot fathom spending more of my life doing this. At the same time, I am scared that I won't find anything else as meaningful; that if I don't continue and I don't use this power for good, I will feel like a phony. Perhaps I would be neglecting a better or more honourable version of myself if I chose to veer off. There's something incredible about being there for people in their most vulnerable moments. About witnessing life, death, survival, and everything in between. That first patient death still sits with me. Not because it was dramatic, but because it wasn't. It was quiet, clinical, and cold. For the doctors, there just isn't time to feel everything when you're drowning in back-to-back patients and broken infrastructure. For me, a student, that loss was raw. I am not numb from the system yet, and whether it is a strength or weakness, I hope that I never become that. So, I don't know what the future holds. I don't know if I'll stay in medicine, or find something else, or totally change paths. I've considered taking business courses or trying out humanities. I've thought about doing a 180° and studying acting. There's always the chance that I could find my very own billionaire and be a happy house mom. The doctors I speak to think I'm crazy for going through medical school without being sure I want to be a doctor. I'm sure my parents will worry that I'll land up being a complete flop. What I do know is that this work has shaped me in ways I'm still trying to understand. And for all its chaos and pain, I feel lucky to have been a part of it — even if just for a little while. Sarah Stein is a fifth year medical student at the University of Cape Town. This story was produced by the . Sign up for the .
