Watching House

Have you noticed that you only ever see a nurse on House when there’s an emergency, or perhaps in the background standing around the nurses station? When a nurse does enter a scene to interact with the doctors it’s only in the most minor of rolls such as handing something to the doctor and that’s it.

Come on lets get real.

There’s a whole team of personnel that work in hospitals and medical clinics and you need every single one of those people to give adequate patient care - from the cleaners right up to the specialty doctors. One part of the team fails and the whole system fails.

How many times have you seen Cameron, Chase and Foreman perform MRI’s, CAT Scans, x-rays, biopsies, heart cathetizations, doplers or ultrasounds, surgeries, lumbar punctures (LP’s), bloodwork etc without a nurse or another doctor, respiratory tech or even an anesthetist in sight?

Many of my readers have been patients in hospitals before. Who takes care of you when you’re in there? Who do you talk to when you are in pain, or when you think you might have a new symptom or remember something that you forgot to say about your condition? It’s the nurse right? It’s also the nurse that monitors your condition and informs the doctor of your concerns, and your general status. It’s the nurses the do the bloodwork, electrocardiograms, MRSA testing, blood cultures, urinary cathertizations and many of the other tasks that we see Cameron, Chase and Foreman doing all the time.

X-ray technitions take x-rays. CT, and MRI techs take MRI’s. Radiologists read all of those results - the cardiologists, neurologists, and infectious disease specialists read the results after they’ve been written out by the radiologist, and occasionally look at the films, but rely on the radiologists to spot any serious problems.

On House, when someone has a heart attack or goes into respiratory arrest who gets paged and who are the only people you usually see in the room? Cameron, Chase, foreman and sometimes House right? Where are the nurses that noticed the patient going downhill or found the patient not breathing?

You know what happens in a real code? A code is a respiratory arrest or a cardiac arrest BTW. The nurse that discovers the patient having trouble begins resuscitating the patient after she (usually it’s a she, but there are plenty of male nurses too) gets some help. Getting help can be pulling the emergency call button or calling to another nurse to make the emergency calls.

When a nurse calls for help during a patients respiratory arrest or cardiac arrest the first two calls that go out are for the patients doctor or the medical internist on call in the hospital, and the respiratory team. A hospital porter or attendant is also usually called to the scene to act as a runner if other equiptment is needed while the arrest is ongoing.

Often at the beginning of a code there are at least FIVE nurses in the room, then the respiratory tech, then ONE or maybe two doctors. They usually arrive in that order too - nurses first, respiratory tech next, then the doctor. The doctor takes over when they get there, but the airway is maintained by the respiratory tech, and the nurses and or attendants are the ones doing CPR and injecting all the medications and starting IV’s. On average there are at least 10 people in the room during a code with the majority of them being nurses.

There’s often someone from housekeeping lurking in the background as well, waiting to clean the floor after the code. Codes ae very messy.

I’d love to see one show, just one show get this right.

I’m so tired of seeing doctors that can do it all. That just doesn’t happen in real life. That would cause confilct of interest, and no doctor would want to take on all of those responsibilities.

Have you ever thought about the lack of nurses and other health care personnel on show’s like House and even Grey’s Anatomy?

I’d love to hear what you think about this situation. Please leave a comment.

HOUSE, Hugh Laurie, no nurses, nurse, respiratory tech, xray tech, MRI tech, CT tech, house keeping, code, respiratory arrest, cardiac arrest, doctors doing blood work, unrealistic, real life, hospital, medical clinic