How Real Doctors Brought ‘The Pitt’ To Life

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. I have been watching and enjoying The Pitt. This is that new medical drama on Max from the creators of ER. And starring one of that old show’s young key actors, all grown up, Noah Wylie.

The season takes place over a single shift. And each episode in the show is one hour of that shift in real time. Medical professionals are praising the show for its accuracy. And I think the issues are so contemporary and the characters so defined that I describe it as The West Wing meets ER.

But just how true is the show to what it’s actually like to work in an emergency room with the overcrowded waiting rooms, the lack of hospital beds, constantly presented with life and death, health conditions, and trying to maintain your sanity at the same time? Here’s what listener Lena in New Jersey had to say.

LENA: As a new EMT who is prepping for nursing school, I absolutely love The Pitt. It’s one of the rare shows that is more medical than drama, unlike so many soaps with scalpels out there. Medical jargon, nuances of patient care, depiction of PTSD, it’s all impressive stuff.

IRA FLATOW: The Pitt season finale is now streaming on Max. And joining me now to talk about the medical accuracy of the show is one of its medical consultants, Dr. Sylvia Owusu-Ansah, associate professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dr. Owusu-Ansah, welcome to Science Friday.

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: Thank you, Ira, for having me. This is it’s so exciting. It’s a dream come true. I’ve always aspired to be on NPR, and here we are with the legendary Ira Flatow. So, so honored to be here.

IRA FLATOW: Thank you. I have to say, I’m with Lena from New Jersey. The Pitt is one of the rare shows that is more medical than drama. And it’s pretty intense, really intense, looking so realistic. You’ve worked in emergency medicine for over 20 years. Is it intense for you to watch it?

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: Oh, it’s utterly intense, but it’s also engaging because it feels so real. For once, we are validated as health care providers watching The Pitt.

I have never been a fan of the medical drama, period. And I have to admittedly say I didn’t watch ER that much. I think I was more focused on getting into medical school, but The Pitt has broken every type of ceiling when it comes to this genre of television. And kudos to everyone who’s worked on this.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, yeah, I agree. Let’s get into this a bit because, as you understood it from the writers, what was the overarching goal of the show?

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: I think the overarching goal– there’s several overarching goals. I think one was to do what they have done– create the most accurate and realistic medical drama series in history, which they accomplished. I think the other thing that they’re using this platform for is to talk about many issues that a lot of us struggle with, where there may be a lot of conflicts, but allow media to tell the story, to tell the story of human beings and their struggles, to tell the story of end of life, to tell the story of health disparities and sickle cell disease, of abortion, a lot of these controversial issues, just allowing people to hear, to the best of their ability, both sides of the story, but understanding that, in each story, there’s a human being behind there, and a human being that you yourself can relate to in some way, shape, or form. And finally, in addition to pulling the wider audience of non-health care providers, they’ve now done the phenomenal thing of pulling us health providers in as well.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, that’s amazing because they really go out of their way to discuss these social issues. Does the emergency room feel in real life like a microcosm of society to you?

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: 100%. So the way I describe the emergency department to most people, we are the gateway to health care. We don’t turn anybody away. We don’t care who you voted for, whether you have insurance or not, what age you are.

If you’re super sick, or maybe mildly sick, we take everyone. And we make sure that you get the health care outcomes that you deserve. And when you look at any other division or department or specialty in medicine, nobody has as open a gateway as emergency medicine.

IRA FLATOW: You’re at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The show takes place in Pittsburgh, hence the name The Pitt. Why Pittsburgh? And what were you asked to consult on?

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: Yeah, I mean, I guess, in talking to Noah Wylie, because I asked him the same thing, is why not Pittsburgh? I mean, Pittsburgh has some solid health care history. You have Tom Starzl, who is one of the first liver transplants. You have Freedom House Ambulance Company started off with 25 Black men and later women, who are the reason why we have EMS today.

IRA FLATOW: And they talk about that in the show. I don’t think anybody knew about that until they exposed the information on that.

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: Yeah, and that’s the beauty of media, right? is being able to tell the masses the true story, the true history behind what we do. And so yeah, we’ll talk about that, and how I aided in that process.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, how did you. Tell us.

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: Yeah. So they were looking for an expert in health disparities in Pittsburgh who works in the emergency department. And Dr. Beth Hoffman, who’s at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, tagged me to be that person.

She works closely with a nonprofit called Hollywood Health and Society. Their job is to bring medical expertise to all TV shows, not just medical dramas. Ms. Roberta Krueger from the Hollywood Health and Society Organization then connected me with the writing room of The Pitt.

So on a Zoom call, virtually sat in front of Dr. Joe Sachs and the entire writing team, and they asked me various questions about health disparities in Pittsburgh. I’m also a pediatric emergency medicine physician and an EMS physician.

So I talked about storylines, my personal storylines on health disparities and sickle cell and pain management. As an EMS physician, I felt it was very important that we talked about Freedom House Ambulance, of which I’m helping to lead on the Congressional Gold Medal for those wonderful men and women, and things such as language equity.

The Nepali woman talked about the different languages spoken in Pittsburgh outside of Yinz speak and some additional the pediatric, the ingestion of the gummies. So things that I thought in pediatrics needed to be brought to the fold– not all the pediatric cases. So didn’t partake in the measles case or the hair tourniquet, but the gummies and some additional other storylines.

IRA FLATOW: And I watched some extra videos where the actors were actually being put through medical boot camp, too.

NOAH WYLIE: Yeah. I mean, they have gone above and beyond. They have about three to four emergency physicians on the set on the production set while filming. And so not only did the actors and actresses go through a medical boot camp so where they actually learned how to place a breathing tube in, or intubate and learn how to put an IV in, or learn how to do various procedures as opposed to mimicking those procedures.

And it’s important to know that Doctor Joe Sachs is an emergency medicine physician who went to film school, hence ER. And he still works part time in the emergency department. So he was able to bring all this ingenuity to light on that set every day. He’s a main medical advisor.

IRA FLATOW: Right. We have a listener question from Ava in Denver, which I wondered myself because she writes, “I’m blown away by the volume of patients waiting to be seen in the ER on this show. What percentage of ERS are that busy? How typical is The Pitt ER in that aspect?”

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: It is a crisis, Ira. We’ve had this health care crisis before COVID. I think COVID was the tipping point. I would say the majority of emergency departments, especially when you think of smaller suburban areas or rural areas where you have community hospitals or tertiary care centers where we are the hospitals that may only have certain types of specialty groups or surgical groups, we’re overwhelmed all the time.

At my hospital, The UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, we see about 200 kids a day, 80,000 to 100,000 children a year in the emergency department alone.

IRA FLATOW: Wow, OK. And we also get to see on the program jobs, support jobs in The Pitt that people don’t usually get– they don’t usually get a role on other medical shows or the social workers, the janitorial staffs, the ER truck drivers, things like that.

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: Yeah, they’ve done a phenomenal job with that, too. I do have some of my colleagues last night were like, where are the PAs? Where are the respiratory therapists? There’s always some additional caveat.

But Dr. Sheila Roth, who’s a good friend of mine and is a social worker here in Pittsburgh, advised on the social work role, I believe, for all episodes. And her husband, Dr. Ron Roth, the former Pittsburgh EMS medical director, advised on the mass casualty incident. And they also used Las Vegas data and information to advise on that as well. So they have gone above and beyond to make it look, feel, get the sense of being in a real emergency department.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, even to slipping on the blood on the floor.

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: Yes, I know. I was waiting. I kept looking at that blood puddle, waiting and waiting. I was like oh, this is inevitable.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about this. The special effects on this show is incredible. I mean, I have to ask you, in particular, we see a live birth, the baby actually emerging from the birth canal. How did they do that?

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: Technology is so advanced in medicine now. The tools that we can use as far as simulation and simulated infants and bodies. And they’re almost like real human beings. We have simulated mannequins that can cry and cough and say ouch and do all kinds of things.

And they’ve taken the time to do that and all kinds of prosthesis. Hats off to the makeup folks and the technical folks that spend hours and hours building these things, putting it together. It’s phenomenal what they’ve done. But I mean, technology has moved in that way in health care where we’re seeing immensely real-life-like things that we can use to study from.

IRA FLATOW: Right And we watched the toll that takes, the mental and the physical toll it takes on the people who work there. And there’s something I was wondering while watching this. This seems one of the hardest jobs in the world. I mean, how can someone do this day after day? And the show actually addresses that. Here’s a clip.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

– The average emergency doctor gets pulled from task A to task B every three to five minutes.

– Remind me again why we picked this specialty?

– Because we all have ADHD, and anything else would be boring as hell.

[END PLAYBACK]

IRA FLATOW: Does that have any truth to it?

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: Oh, Ira, it has so much truth to it. There’s so many times where I’m in a patient’s room that’s really sick and what we call trying to die. And I’ll go to the next room, and that patient is not as sick, but the parent doesn’t understand that and doesn’t want to hear that.

And it’s hard. As a pediatric emergency medicine physician, I have to tell parents that their kid has died. I have to tell parents that their kid has cancer for the first time. I have to tell parents that their kid has to take insulin for the rest of their lives. Or we need to put a breathing tube down because they can’t breathe.

And there’s little time to decompress and move on to the next one, just as it’s expressed in The Pitt. And so it does take a mental toll on us. We’re doing a little bit better. One of the things I did advise on was the moment of silence, which is what we do at Children’s. Anytime there is a passing, we take a moment to celebrate the patient’s life. And we take a moment for ourselves as health providers to take a deep breath and move on to the next patient.

IRA FLATOW: And what we see a lot is that the doctors, a lot of times, just don’t know what the patient has. It’s like detective work, right?

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: It is 100% detective work. And a lot of times, I explain to patients, look, my job is to rule out the life threatening things, the things that will kill you right now that we can solve. If not that, then what we’ll do is we’ll work with our other health care providers, your primary care physician, specialty groups, to make sure that you feel better. But we might not be able to do it here and now, in this moment.

IRA FLATOW: And one thing that Noah Wylie, the head of the ER at that time, is constantly complaining about to the higher ups, to the suits, so to speak, of the hospital, is that there’s a shortage of this, there’s a shortage of that. There is a nursing shortage. They don’t want to spend money on stuff. Does that really go on?

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: That really goes on. We get emails pretty much weekly, sometimes daily, on drug shortages. The nursing shortage is not the only shortage that’s been out there. Our EMS clinicians, our EMTs and paramedics, we’ve had a health care crisis there for a while, for decades, because they don’t get paid in the way that they should get paid. There are less people going into primary care specialties in medicine, the specialties that help take care of the normal ailments and keep you better on a regular basis. So there is a decline on all spectrums of medicine.

IRA FLATOW: The highlight of the season– and no spoilers here– was how the air handled a mass shooting, where they treated over 100 patients. Here’s a clip from that show.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

– We saw 112 mass casualty patients come through here in the last four hours, and 106 of them are going to live.

[END PLAYBACK]

IRA FLATOW: Have you ever been through a mass shooting like that you had to take care of patients?

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: I have not personally been through a mass shooting, but we practice. We do what’s called disaster preparedness, and we run tables, and we practice that, which is a scary thing, but it is very real.

I mean, I saw Mr. John Wells last night. And one thing he said about that is, nowhere in there did they mention the word gun control. But the whole idea is that just by telling the story, you recognize how certain behaviors or certain acts can be devastating on all parts.

IRA FLATOW: Right. So tell me what the response has been like from the health care community in general?

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: Finally, finally, we can say thank you. Thank you for validating us. We feel like there was this transient period where people during COVID recognized that we were superheroes. And it’s nothing to take away from the banging pots and pans in the windows every night, but that easily faded away.

But the work that we do has never. I mean, we’ve been working like this before COVID, markedly increased during COVID, and we’re still doing the deed after COVID. And so finally, finally, finally, thanks to these phenomenal executive producers and writers at The Pitt, I think we as health providers feel validated in what we

Do. And to your point, Ira, earlier of wow, I didn’t realize this job was so hard. We have patients come in that don’t recognize that. And I think now we’re starting to have patients because of The Pitt that were like, they recognized that. We have family members, spouses, aunts, uncles, parents that are like, wow.

Like, my best friends– I call them the bear girls. Shout out to them– they watched it with me, and they were asking me– they’re like, but you don’t really see that many patients? And I’ve known them for 20 years, Ira. And I was like, yes, I do.

But they’re not all trying to die. I said, but yes, they are. And they’re like, wow. And we’ve known each other for 20 years. And I love them to death. And it has made a difference. It has made an impact.

IRA FLATOW: Well, that’s a good segue into this final clip I want to play from the season finale, and I’ll set it up. They’ve just finished a brutal shift. Noah Wylie’s character, Dr. Robby, the head of the ER, speaks to the ER staff.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

– We saw our better angels come to the aid of our patients. Each of you rose to the occasion. And I can’t tell you how proud I am of all of you. This place will break your heart, but it is also full of miracles. And that is a testament to all of you coming together and doing what we do best.

[END PLAYBACK]

IRA FLATOW: Real sentiment there?

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: I couldn’t have said it any better. I couldn’t have said it any better.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Sylvia, I want to thank you for what you do and for taking time to be with us today.

SYLVIA OWUSU-ANSAH: Yes, thank you, Ira, for giving me the opportunity to speak. And thank you for what you all do in the media space to get the word out to millions.

IRA FLATOW: You’re welcome. Dr. Sylvia Owusu-Ansah, associate professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in, of course, Pittsburgh, PA.

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