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 “The cases depicted on TV dramas tend to have very binary outcomes -
an injured patient gets an urgent heroic operation and either
doesn't make it, and the doctors, nurses, and family members then
grieve, or alternatively the patient survives to be sitting up in
bed the next day fully recovered, hugging their family members,”
said study co-author Dr. Jordan Weinberg, trauma medical director at
St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center Phoenix in Arizona.
“In real life, we more often see relatively drawn-out recoveries
that require long hospital stays, long-term inpatient care and
ongoing management of pain, discomfort, and disability,” Weinberg
said by email.
“In an era where patient satisfaction is a major component of the
quality initiatives of healthcare institutions and a
pay-for-performance measure in many physician compensation plans, it
is important to develop awareness of the drivers of patient
satisfaction,” Weinberg’s team writes in the journal Trauma Surgery
& Acute Care Open.
To see how much TV scenarios differ from reality, Weinberg and
colleagues compared what happened to 290 fictional trauma patients
on “Grey’s Anatomy” with outcomes for real life injuries sustained
by 4,812 patients in a national registry of trauma cases.
They found the death rate was three times higher on TV: 22 percent
of trauma patients died on the show compared with 7 percent in real
life.
Survivors did better on TV, too.
Half of the seriously injured patients on TV spent less than a week
in the hospital, while only 20 percent of real patients had such
brief stays.
Only 6 percent of TV patients got transferred to a long-term care
facility, compared with 22 percent of actual patients.
Surgery also happened faster on TV: 71 percent of patients on the
show got rushed straight to the operating room from the emergency
department, compared with only 25 percent of real life patients.
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The study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove whether
or how viewing trauma cases on TV might impact how patients and
families feel about real life trauma care. Researchers also focused
on a single television medical drama, and it’s possible depictions
of trauma cases might differ on other shows.
Even so, the results suggest that clinicians should consider the
possibility that TV might color expectations, said Elena Strauman, a
researcher in health communication at the College of Charleston in
South Carolina.
“Since television requires dramatic tension, a patient or family
might underestimate the chance of survival, and be pleasantly
surprised at a positive result,” Strauman, who wasn’t involved in
the study, said by email. “They may also be surprised to find that
there is not a quick fix to the problem and that they or their loved
ones have a much longer and more arduous recovery ahead.”
Clinicians may have to work harder to manage expectations for fans
of TV medical dramas than they might for patients whose ideas about
trauma cases aren’t shaped by these shows, Weinberg said.
“For patients that suddenly find themselves hospitalized after
injury, having no opportunity to have been educated on what to
expect, their expectation regarding their recovery may be largely
based by what they have seen on shows like Grey's,” Weinberg added.
“It is important for healthcare providers to be thinking about this
in order to help patients and their families to adjust their
expectations accordingly.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2EGJIJs Trauma Surgery & Acute Care Open,
online February 19, 2018.
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