The Pitt remains ‘strikingly authentic’ in second season

Like millions of others, Dr. Steven A. Valassis says he is a big fan of “The Pitt.”

Valassis says he appreciates the realism of the HBO Max hit drama series and its depiction of a Pittsburgh hospital’s emergency department. And Valassis should know, since he’s an emergency medical doctor at Hartford HealthCare St. Vincent Medical Center.

“I think it really is a strikingly authentic portrayal of emergency medicine, especially what it looks like in a busy emergency department,” Valassis tells Chief Healthcare Executive®.

The Emmy-winning drama starring Noah Wyle wraps up its second season Thursday, and the show has been renewed for a third season. Most of the show is filmed in Los Angeles, but some scenes are shot in Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh.

The show has won acclaim for its gripping stories and compelling characters, and doctors have said the show gets the details right.

Valassis says that he finds his fellow emergency physicians fall into two camps.

“You've got some of these physicians who are big fans, who love watching it, and love how accurately it reflects their lives,” Valassis says. “And then you have some who can't watch it because it actually is so real for them that they get stressed out. They feel like they're on shift, and they're like, ‘Listen, I'm home to relax right now. I can't be in this.’”

“They couldn't watch it. It's very different than some of the other medical dramas that are really dramas. I think this one is very real,” he adds.

Valassis says that the show’s camera work adds to the realism of the show.

“I think that was striking for me is the way that the camera moves, and so it really feels like you're walking through that waiting room, that you're walking into a patient's room, and it makes it very realistic,” Valassis says.

Dr. Randy Katz, district medical director of emergency services for the Memorial Healthcare System, also praises the show’s authentic portrayal of an emergency department in an urban hospital.

“I think the technical aspects of the show are spot on,” Katz tells Chief Healthcare Executive®. “I mean, they've done a very good job of producing and researching what really happens, including terminology and procedures.”

Some emergency physicians have especially appreciated how The Pitt shows the genuine toll on doctors and nurses of working in an incredibly stressful environment.

Wyle’s character, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, memorably breaks down in season one and continues to grapple with his trauma throughout the second season. Likewise, nurse Dana Evans, portrayed by Emmy winner Katherine LaNasa, also struggles with the fallout from being struck by a patient in the first season, an experience all too common to emergency nurses.

Katz says he’s grateful for the show’s repeated focus on the mental health of doctors and nurses in the emergency room.

“I think it is a real issue,” he says. “And if you look at all of the polls in health care with respect to specialties, emergency medicine is always number one on the list with burnout surveys.”

In the second season, The Pitt has dealt with another disturbingly common experience for hospitals with a cyberattack that has affected other facilities in the area, prompting the hospital to shut down its computers and return to using paper. The show also featured tension with immigration officers in the emergency room, prompting some patients - and some staff - to leave the hospital for fear of being taken into custody.

The Pitt also offered a glimpse of the lack of access for patients in rural areas. In one episode, a patient arrives at the emergency room, barely in time for life-saving care, and his son says he drove 90 minutes because a small rural hospital nearby had recently closed.

Dr. Dhruv Khullar, a physician and an associate professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, wrote in a January essay in The New Yorker that the show taught him lessons about being a good doctor. And he says the show is also offering a window into the stresses on the healthcare system.

“What’s special about ‘The Pitt’ isn’t that it’s medically accurate, although it is. (I even learned a few things about how to insert an emergency chest tube.) What’s special about the show is that it offers a kaleidoscopic view of how societal problems have come to pervade medicine,” Khullar wrote.

Dr. Hamad Husainy, chief medical officer of PointClickCare, told Chief Healthcare Executive in a January interview that he appreciates The Pitt showing emergency medicine, doctors and nurses in a way that’s “honest and truthful.”

“Unfortunately, it's incredibly realistic,” Husainy said.

“The reality is, those are the inefficiencies, those are the hurdles, those are the barriers that we deal with every day as clinicians,” he said. “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.”

Perhaps the only aspect of the show that is a bit too dramatic is the sheer number of crises occurring within one day.

While Katz says the emergency room is undoubtedly very busy, he says, mercifully, it’s not quite as dramatic and harrowing as the day in The Pitt.

“I've worked in a fair number of departments, and there are some that are definitely much more intense than others with respect to the full acuity and trauma and those types of things, but nothing at that level,” he says. “I mean, that's just on another level.”