The Pitt season 2 may not have been entirely picture-perfect.
In an interview with ScreenRant‘s Grant Hermanns halfway through the season, Dr. David Shapiro spoke about the popular medical drama The Pitt and how the series gets things right, but also gets things wrong. Dr. Shapiro points out characters like Dr. Yolanda Garcia (played by Alexandra Metz), who is not portrayed entirely accurately. “She’s great in her assessments. She’s very mean to people and nasty, and that’s not what modern surgical residents are, so it’s very unusual to see that,” states Dr. Shapiro.
Another major error in the series that Dr. Shapiro commented on is the discussion surrounding patients’ health and the lack of confidentiality shown in the series:
“The screaming, the talking about other people’s health, other patients by name in front of other patients, is just not allowed. That’s a standard of care that you just don’t do, and that should have been gone six iterations of the show ago. I know that there’s a flow to drama that you have to include some embellishments, but there’s a way to refer to patients.
Like, you can’t say, ‘Mr. Yin is doing this in the other room, and I’m really worried about ’em,’ in front of another patient. You have to say, ‘Your patient in six,’ or, ‘I need to speak to you about your patient. Can you step out?’ Those things are easy to do. I just think it needs to be done.”
Dr. Shapiro also comments on the wrong instruments being used in The Pitt for procedures, such as a tool being labeled incorrectly. “They are using the wrong instruments for some things, and it drives me crazy. They even said something like, ‘We’ll take the trach hook.’ That wasn’t a trach hook, it was a retractor.” What Dr. Shapiro also thought was strange was how medical students had to handle procedures that are usually never done by those who are underqualified:
“There’s also concerns that I have in depicting how learners, residents, fellows, and medical students are utilized in these settings. Somebody was on their first day of an experience, and they’re being asked to do procedures that no medical student would ever be asked to do, especially in modern times. I was asked to do those things 25 years ago, and it was inappropriate. Then some things just aren’t done that way.”
Dr. Shapiro also brings up how transferring patients is an outdated concept, and says that it can be an MLA violation. He continues by adding:
“The fact that they transferred one guy who had a shoulder surgery and had no insurance and then came back, come on. That’s a crazy thing, number one. Number two, a case manager would never say, “You can’t do that here,” and a case manager would never say, “We’re going to change our nursing protocols on the floor and have you move a patient to this area,” when they shouldn’t be there, because we should not be compromising someone’s care because of their insurance.
The most recent episode that I saw was the gentleman who was having a diabetic ketoacidosis event at his construction site, and his family comes in, and the daughter wants to do a GoFundMe for him, and they decided to take him off the insulin drip, which is best practice, and do something different to maintain his need for level of care that he can afford. You can modify certain things like that if someone’s worried about it, but you shouldn’t violate the standard of care for where that patient needs to be.
If you can discount a patient, you can discount a patient, number one. Number two, a patient who’s uninsured, eventually they’re going to get to the point where they just owe you money, and they have to be on a payment plan, and they wind up cutting the amount you owe anyway.”
The surgeon also has some advice for series star Noah Wyle, who portrays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch on The Pitt. Dr. Shaprio wants Wyle to “focus on the medics and the EMTs a bit more. Give them a little bit more love, because they’re great. The ones who portray them are doing a great job, the writing for them is excellent. They do a lot more in the field than people give credit for, and this is The Pitt. It’s the place they go to.”
However, it’s not all bad, as Dr. Shapiro has a lot of positivity surrounding the medical drama, and one major thing that the surgeon has praised is the representation of those from all walks of life:
“You see a trans or nb (non-binary) character, you see all races and genders represented, languages and diversity, because that’s what healthcare is. We see nurses everywhere. I love the nurses who chat a lot in Tagalog, because they’re amazing, and I love that there’s Farsi being spoken, because we do see this in medicine. There is diversity, and there are tons of people who are either foreign-born or from immigrant families who were raised with different languages being spoken in their homes, and they are demonstrating that. I love everything about it, and I wouldn’t change a single thing about that. I just want to see even more of it.”
The Pitt is available to watch on HBO Max.