Things that annoy you when it comes to medical stuff on tv

[Soubriquet]

When they wake up and immediately rip out their cannulas and walk off. No!!!

It doesn’t work like that and I unfortunately had first hand experience last week when a lady did just that. Blood every where

I work on a dementia unit and dementia is never realistically portrayed. The person with dementia on TV is usually delightfully dotty and bit forgetful, not incontinent, aggressive, refusing to eat and drink and telling everyone within earshot to fuck off, and being nursed 1:1 because of their behaviour.

I recently watched a film where the doctor put a blood pressure cuff on upside down but still got an accurate reading - what a guy 😁

Yes! Surely they'd have to go to Alder Hey!?

The hair! Ok this is mainly American medical dramas which are as much love life focused as medical… but they all have long swishy heavily styled hair. Isn’t that a health hazard??

Ambulance crews yell their handover while wheeling the patient along a ridiculously long corridor to resus. Not all the staff are present and no one is writing it down. Plus anyone could hear. Casualty and ER are big culprits for

There is enough PPE. It fits perfectly. The scrubs match and they don't ever bugger up putting their gloves on.

Nurses have breaks.

Nurses have car parking spaces.

Elderly people never have to wait days weeks for a care package / equipment / hosptial transport.

Junior (male) docs tell nurses who were running casualty departments when the wee doc was a mere twinkle, how to do their jobs. To be fair that can happen. But the bright ones learn not to do it twice.

When they need to sedate someone urgently and they give an IM injection, which works immediately and knocks the person out.

Everyone always has teeth on telly. All of them, in good nick.

Nobody has dysarthria, they're all enunciating perfectly.

Tbf mainly the patients are all so YOUNG on telly.

Also I nearly exploded when that drama Litvinenko was on TV. I'm sure they had taped a piece of suction tubing to his face instead of an NG.

That they decide to do an MRI, machine immediately available and whatever doctor looks at the scan can diagnosis immediately. Plus a cardio surgeon seems to be able to do brain surgery and all sorts with equal expertise.

Fuck me, this annoys me so much! I saw one film once when there was a realistic amount of blood on the arm afterwards, but the patient was unrealistically unphased.

Another one is piss-weak chest compressions.

The fact there appears to be only 2 possible outcomes from any surgery - complete and instantaneous recovery or death on the table.
Multi purpose staff who are delivering babies one minute, running an Intensive Care Unit the next.
The total lack of any recognisable training programmes or HR processes. People get promoted or change roles willy nilly apparently.
And my personal bugbear - surgeons telling anaesthetists what to do when patients have their (almost inevitable) intraoperative collapse. That's a real "tell me you've never worked in an operating theatre without telling me you've never worked in an operating theatre" moment.
I know compromises have to be made for dramatic effect but you'd think they could make things a teeny bit more realistic.

This is what I was going to say. If only it worked that quickly

Patients receive pain relief.
Nowadays that doesn't seem to happen.

If only it was injected into the right place.
Doctors are always giving i/v injections into the upper arm.
When they do give i/v injections in the right place, they never draw back to make sure they're in the vein.

A surprising number of patients treated are members of staff.

Patient has loads of visitors and is sitting up in bed wearing a hospital gown. All those people and nobody thought to bring the patient some pyjamas.

The sheer number of extremely rare conditions that occur in a small amount of time in one hospital.

And the fact there's always some genius medic or uber-ebthusiastic student who just happened to just read a research paper about an uber-rare condition and ta-da one appeared.

Though the reality of extremely common conditions occurring in mostly old people/ people with a lifestyle where the common issue is indeed common aren't that exciting I guess.

Always really shit depictions of seizures, like their only direction was "yeah just like start flopping about a lot and wiggle"
Casualty was awful for it. I think it must contribute to how poorly recognised actual seizures are in public because in real life they pretty much never look like that.

Someone getting seen, diagnosed and treated straight away on the NHS,

On Corrie, Peter Barlow, a raging alcoholic, got a liver transplant straight away, despite the fact he was drinking dangerous amounts ae few days before. Eastenders had it better: Phil had to be alcohol free for (I think) 6 months before he would be put on the list, then it was a good while before an appropriate donor became available.

Psychiatrists in films who have no boundaries, to the point of letting patients call them after hours and visit them at home/come on holiday with them.

I have also seen (a few times) people preparing to give an IV injection or insert a cannula, with the needle facing the wrong way.

Patients with dementia never tell staff that they own the hospital/nursing home and they’ll sack you if you don’t work harder.

Holby city where everything was done in near darkness ! All hospitals are brightly lit !!

I meant random so-called friends and neighbours can walk in, then be left alone with patients.

Non-rebreather mask around people's necks