‘The Pitt’ is ‘honest’ about emergency medicine

After much anticipation, “The Pitt” has returned for its second season.

The HBO Max drama has earned widespread praise for its realistic portrayal of the demands of emergency medicine and the toll it takes on doctors and nurses in the hospital. The show’s season premiere debuted Thursday night.

Most of the show is filmed in Los Angeles, but some scenes are filmed in Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. Doctors have lauded the show for its uncanny accuracy of life in the emergency room.

Hamad Husainy, MD, the chief medical officer of PointClickCare, spent years in emergency medicine. Husainy watched the first season and he tells Chief Healthcare Executive® that the show’s depiction of an emergency department rings true.

“It's incredibly realistic,” Husainy says.

“It really highlights the emergency department in a way that is honest and truthful,” he says.

The episodes feature great writing and acting, but Husainy says the show succeeds in illustrating the problems in emergency medicine.

“The reality is, those are the inefficiencies, those are the hurdles, those are the barriers that we deal with every day as clinicians,” he says. “Those are the issues that patients deal with when they come to seek care and they're told that either, we don't have it, or it's unavailable.”

Husainy says his favorite part of the show is that “it highlights how dynamic people are.”

“Understanding that a nurse is not a nurse is not a nurse. A doc is not a doc is not a doc. They have lives, they have families, they have emotions,” he says.

Dan Laurent, senior vice president of corporate communications at Highmark Health, told Chief Healthcare Executive® in an interview last summer that the show’s producers worked meticulously to get the details of the hospital right. (Highmark is the parent organization of Allegheny General.)

“They're getting it right because they're doing it right,” Laurent said. “They're engaging with the clinicians who provide care in a setting to make sure that the language they're using is accurate and the care that they're providing is accurate.”

When the producers made their pitch to film some scenes at Allegheny General, Laurent said they pledged to offer a realistic view of the emergency department.

““I think they delivered on everything that they promised us in those initial conversations,” he said. “And so we were extremely gratified that it really did turn out how they had portrayed it in their minds and really delivered on the product.”

The show also illustrates the mental health challenges of doctors and nurses. Noah Wyle, who won an Emmy for best actor in a drama for his work in the first season, has urged Congress to provide more support to protect the mental health of hospital workers.

The Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation, which has pushed for more federal support for healthcare workers’ mental health needs, lauded The Pitt for a scene in the final episode of the first season. In the scene, a doctor expresses reluctance about seeking mental health treatment for fear that it could damage or even end his career. Wyle’s character, Dr. Robby tells him, “That’s not true anymore.”

Most state medical boards have dropped invasive questions about mental health in credential applications, and more hospitals are dropping such questions as well.

The first episode of the new season is now on HBO Max. New episodes will appear on Thursdays. And HBO Max has already announced there will be a third season of “The Pitt.”