On Sunday night, a TV show about the heartbreaking chaos faced by healthcare workers beat other hit series like Severance and The Last of Us for several awards at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards.
HBO’s The Pitt won three awards during the ceremony: Outstanding Drama Series, Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. The show has only been on the air for a single season, with each one of its 15 episodes chronicling an hour in the grueling 15-hour shift of fictional Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, played by Noah Wyle.
Wyle, who took home the trophy for outstanding lead actor, is no stranger to playing a TV doctor, having portrayed Dr. John Carter on ER throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s. In fact, he chose to return to this type of role as a co-creator of The Pitt, inspired by letters from healthcare workers who shared how much ER had meant to them and how it helped them through tough times.
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He saw an opportunity to spotlight what healthcare workers are going through now, especially given persistent staffing shortages and the lasting effects of the pandemic.
One physician, Dr. Jason Cohen, said The Pitt does a good job of accurately depicting the realities of emergency departments, especially the boarding challenges. Dr. Cohen is a physician and chief medical officer of inpatient at patient flow automation startup Qventus. He has experienced emergency department inefficiencies firsthand across hospitals in rural Montana, and he is now devoting his career to technology that can improve the patient discharge process.
“Hospitals are seeing record ED boarding times. Why would that potentially happen? It’s not as though people are having more emergencies today than they were 10 years ago. It’s not that people have less access to primary care — in fact, with the Affordable Care Act, more people have access to PCPs and care than they did before. It’s largely because our inpatient bed capacity has really eroded over the last several years,” Dr. Cohen explained.
The country has lost about 15% of its inpatient hospital beds since before the pandemic, and this issue has been compounded by a severe nursing shortage, he said.
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He highlighted an interaction in the series’ pilot episode in which Wiley’s character is having a discussion with a hospital administrator about why patient satisfaction scores are so low among patients who visit the emergency department. The administrator demanded to know why so many patients were waiting 12 hours to be seen by a provider.
Wiley’s character told her that patients are stuck in the emergency room because there are no available inpatient beds upstairs, and she responded that she can’t do anything about it. Wiley’s character then pointed out that the real issue is a lack of nurses to staff those beds upstairs, which the administrator said she can’t hire them due to widespread staffing shortages.
“They’re both right — they’re both identifying a problem that hospitals are seeing across the country. Patient satisfaction scores are going down because you shouldn’t have to wait 12 hours to get care in an emergency room. But as you see in the show, it’s not as though those ED providers aren’t working hard — they’re busting all day long to try to get patients seen. And it’s not like the administrators wouldn’t like to open up more beds — they would. There’s just not enough nurses,” Dr. Cohen remarked.
He added that emergency department boarding is not just an operational or patient satisfaction issue — it’s also a quality and safety problem. For example, elderly patients face a 4% higher mortality risk for every night they spend boarding in the emergency department, Dr. Cohen stated.
He also stressed the toll on clinical staff, who are constantly operating in a reactive, chaotic environment that fuels burnout and inefficiency.
In Dr. Cohen’s eyes, solutions must not only improve patient flow through automation but also decrease the burden on frontline care teams. Adding tasks to a doctor or nurse’s already overloaded workflows is unsustainable, so technology needs to focus on how to help providers make their jobs more manageable, he declared.
Photo: Douglas Sacha, Getty Images