Everything I Learnt About Nursing, I Learnt From TV...

... And Then Had To Promptly Relearn When I Actually Stepped Onto A Ward.

Okay, this title is actually a Lie. I learnt very little from hospital dramas or 'hospital' scenes in soap operas and TV shows and took everything I found out on them (snicker) with a EU food mountain of salt. I just thought it made a neater title than Why Hospital Dramas Are Inaccurate, although that is a rather more accurate way describing what it is I'm getting agitated about today.

I know hospital dramas and shows in general are fiction. I know that one of the things that makes fiction, well, fictional, is that real life is goddamn boring and needs a fair bit of tweaking in order to become a little less goddamn boring. I know that working in a hospital is actually pretty demanding, equally tiring and Not Glamorous At All and therefore an accurate hospital drama would probably be about as entertaining as a colonoscopy.

(Actually, it wouldn't be. I saw a colonoscopy performed on Monday and it was fascinating, actually.)

Okay then. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that an accurate hospital drama would be about as entertaining as having a colonoscopy, bowel prep, heavy sedation, potential serious gastrointestinal problems and all. Watching a colonoscopy is actually pretty interesting and I doubt I'm alone in thinking this but having one, I admit, really would not be. At all. It would be both rather dull and not exactly comfortable.

So yes, an accurate hospital drama would probably be a turn-off, as would accurate 'hospital' scenes in soap operas and TV dramas. But what I'm complaining about isn't the storylines (well, not really, though they are on crack). What I'm complaining about is the more basic inaccuracies. Simply, there are just so many things wrong these programs that it's absolutely amazing. Don't these people have technical advisers? If so, why can't they get things to look and sound right at least? It's just bizarre.

• Drug Charts.

You can't get a drug from the chemist's without a prescription. It's just the same in hospitals. A patient cannot be given a drug unless it has been prescribed by the doctor and it has to be written down on a chart. It has to be written just so or staff are not allowed to administer it. It's that simple. And yet in hospital dramas we never seem to see anyone holding a drug chart, let alone writing anything down or actually referring to one before giving any medication. That's just plain bad practice, dammit!


• Patients.

Why do none of the people on these shows ever actually look ill? I've seen patients who are supposedly in comas. In spite of the tubes and drips and drains (of which there are ever enough, anyway) most of them look as if they got a bit tired of walking round on set and decided to have a nice little lie down on a convenient bed. None of them ever look unhealthy enough and why not? Their skin tone is too good, their complexions are too fine, their hair looks too well-tended. In short none of them ever look sallow, underweight and generally ill. Couldn't someone put some makeup on them so they actually looked a little sick rather than perfectly perfused and as if they were just waiting for the most dramatic moment to open their eyes?


• Catheters.

Now we're really getting into the nasty side of nursing. Hate to be the one to say this, but unconscious patients still have to, you know, go. It's kind of odd that no matter how badly injured or comatose patients are on these shows we never so much as see a catheter. Okay - you never see them in any hospital show or drama or anime or... whatever. All the same, it does make me wonder how they deal with unconscious patients when they need to, you know, go in one of these dramas (and I'm trying to be delicate here - among nurses I'd be disgustingly clinical).


• Cardiac Arrest.

Shown on TV, a cardiac arrest is always the dramatic flat line of asystole. And yet what do the staff do when this happens? They grab the defibrillator, stick on the electrodes and proceed to try and shock the poor flatlining bastard back into the land of the living. Sadly, this is useless in the case of asystole. In that case all that would happen is, less dramatically, the patient would be given injections of adrenaline. You could shock the poor soul all you wanted and it wouldn't make any difference. Ventricular fibrillation, by the way, is represented by a crazy wobbly line as the electrical impulses in the heart go haywire, so it's not a flat line at all.

There are other things, too. Why do all the nurses have such perfect hair instead of the 'it's up, it'll do' look favored by most of us? Why does nobody ever mislay the CD keys? Hell, why does nobody ever check the CD stocks and check nobody is stealing all the precious diamorphine? Why do all the doctors and nurses go out socializing after a shift never mind that our shifts don't finish at the same time and most people (especially if they're working the following day) would simply be too tired? Why does nobody ever look tired?

Finally, why does nobody ever actually seem to do any work, either? It'd be nice to show up and get paid, even on a student's salary, for sitting round having intrigues, bitching and back-biting about my colleagues, having affairs with married consultants and occasionally remembering that there are actually some patients about the place and going to peer at them just for the sake of balance? After which I could go back to trysting with the married consultant in the treatment room...

...actually, no, the treatment room would be unhygenic. In a bathroom? On an investigation couch? There are so many wonderful possibilities without resorting to one of the beds, or - the last resort of the desperate - a sluice room. And all this without even mussing my salon-perfect hair.

Hm, maybe I'm going about this student nurse thing the wrong way. I need to look into getting a job in one of these places!