I was recently talking to an oncologist about health communication when he mentioned The Pitt, that hit medical drama set in an emergency department in Pittsburgh. Now in its second season, the show prides itself on its accuracy and realism. I’ll share two things this oncologist thinks the show gets right related to communication.
Hi, everybody. This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. Since 2017, we’ve been giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement experience and satisfaction. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator specializing in communication and education. This podcast makes space to dig into what it’s easy to take for granted about communication in our professional lives, especially in healthcare and public health, but increasingly across sectors because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn and get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make.
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I heard about The Pitt the same way lots of people hear about The Pitt: from a medical professional. Yes, today’s episode comes from a conversation I just had with oncologist and healthcare communication champion Mark O’Rourke, about communication and healthcare. The Pitt came up and Mark shared a few observations about its approach to health communication. As soon as I got off the phone with Mark, I looked up the show. Now, I don’t have HBO Max, so I couldn’t watch it directly. So if you are in the same situation, they have a podcast on YouTube and their podcast picks up about season two. I’m working my way through it. So I’m not here to review the show, but I want to talk about what Mark said and explore what those ideas might suggest.
The first thing he said was that he thought the scenarios were accurate. He says he doesn’t always agree with how the actors respond to the scenarios, but he felt they were true to life. And the show apparently prides itself on being medically accurate. The showrunners explain that there are two physician full-time writers on the show. And the showrunners say that those physicians have veto power. If they see something that wouldn’t realistically happen, they’re allowed to call it out and they’re not going to put it into the show. They also have four ED physicians who rotate onto the set and eight to 10 nurses who also come in and work for the show when they’re not on shift.
So that brings me to the second point that Dr. O’Rourke had. He said on the show, everyone is stressed. The attending is stressed. The residents are stressed. The nurses are stressed. The social workers are stressed. And that stuck with me because we were talking about health communication. And I think this kind of reframes what usually gets called a communication challenge, as something more structural. We see people trying to communicate well under continuous pressure of several kinds. Stress is the default. It seemed to me that’s what Dr. O’Rourke was appreciating, that The Pitt accurately captures how communication is being shaped and constrained by constant stress and system pressure. And it’s in these contexts that we’ve got practitioners doing their level best, especially those who recognize that communication has an impact on downstream risks and outcomes.
And it’s this reframing communication issues as less skill problems and more environmental problems that I want to park it on for a minute. It’s kind of like stress is, like the secret, or missing, or unspoken variable in conversations about, quote unquote,
good communication. You know your techniques. You know your frameworks. You know your steps. In reality, everyone is operating under sustained pressure. So how many of those techniques survive contact with reality? How are you thinking and acting in the moment so that you can do as much good, and prevent as much downstream harm, as possible?
And it’s these kinds of issues that we make space for. In this show, in this podcast series, if you’ve been listening even just a little, I hope it’s clear we see the central task isn’t remedying some skills deficit. It’s more aligned with recognizing the environment in which communication is happening and then supporting what thoughtful actions practitioners can possibly, meaningfully take.
It’s not theoretical. We’ve had specialists in intense fields who’ve been kind enough to stop by this show and share their lived experiences.
For example, Dr. Timothy Gilligan, an oncologist from Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Gilligan, he said he was trying to make sure he doesn’t
spend too much time at the computer and the chart at the expense of being present. with his patients. He recognized the importance of the information that the patient has to share. And it’s an important thing for him to realize and for him to emphasize when he teaches that he can get better outcomes and take better care of his patients when he shows up that way.
Another clinician, hematologist Dr. Lachelle Dawn Weeks. told me that “a lot of the work you do doesn’t happen at the bedside for the patient. It happens in terms of documentation, sitting at a computer, writing stuff down, orders, answering pages. And as a result, you can lose track of the people that you came to work for.” So it was important to her to have moments where she communicates with her patients to get to understand their lives, their background. And it’s helped her tailor her information to each individual person when she does that.
Paul Rannelli, a–retired now, congratulations, Paul–Pharmacist at University of Minnesota Duluth campus. He talks about institutional pressure toward just telling patients what to do, rather than asking and listening to the patients. Paul points out, “we all have things to do. We have a car to catch, a child who’s not very happy because they’re ill and it doesn’t make the best environment for communication.” So he imagines you got 30 seconds, you gather two pieces of information and you give out the two most important pieces of information based on what you learned. He talks about how he shows the students examples of what you can do in a very short amount of time to make that connection with the patient.
And finally, I want to tell you another example from the show from Chief Medical Officer at Essence Healthcare and Board Certified family physician, Saria Sacoccio. Her whole interview episode was literally about chaos at work, and getting out of chaos. She said, “we’re in a state of chaos and change. And you have to get control over your own behaviors and how you show up at work.” And Saria shares two steps that she uses herself as a physician, and that she uses with her team as a physician leader.
Now, those are four examples from this show. And obviously, I’m going to go ahead and drop all of those links in the notes. But I want to take a minute to look across them and kind of connect back to The Pitt. I think across all of those stories, we hear the stressful environment that the clinicians are working in, and how easy it is to kind of slip into task mode or lose the human interaction. But we hear how the clinicians don’t do that. We hear how they respond to their environments.
And they’re not describing these big, idealistic changes. We hear them talking about small, deliberate choices. in the moment. Like staying present instead of turning to the screen, or asking one more question instead of just giving instructions, or adjusting how they communicate based on the person in front of them, or just deciding how they want to show up.
There also seems to be a shared mindset. They’re paying attention to their own behavior in real time and adjusting it according to what they notice about the context. They’re actively managing the interaction as it’s happening. There’s a lot of downstream issues and actions are shaped right there in the encounter.
Now this show seeks to support professionals in the hardest parts of your conversations. And maybe that’s why this kind of content is gaining traction right now. We were recently ranked in the top 50 medical podcasts on GoodPods. For two months in a row. I don’t take that lightly, especially in the medical category where there are so many high powered shows. Also meaningful to me because, well, this is a show about communication, and we’re ranking in the medical category. This ranking too is based on real audience activity. So it literally means more people are discovering, listening to, engaging with, because it’s a mix of listens, saves. shares and other kinds of engagement. So I was really happy to hear it. It suggests the conversations we’re having are actually landing with people who care
about this space.
So if you’re trying to make this kind of work happen across a team or an organization, that’s actually what I do. Visit healthcommunicationpartners.com and click on contact. Message me on Instagram at healthcommunicationpartners or connect with me on LinkedIn. And while you’re there, let me know: What do you think The Pitt gets right about health communication?
This has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. Audio engineering and music from Joe Liebel. Additional music from Alexis Rounds. Thanks for listening to 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners, LLC. Find us at healthcommunicationpartners.com.