Inside the real Pittsburgh hospital behind HBO's 'The Pitt'

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: HBO’s pulse-pounding medical drama “The Pitt” is back for season two, fresh off critical praise and five Emmy wins. Its unflinching look at a single emergency room shift struck an especially deep chord with one group, frontline health care workers.

To understand why, I traveled to the actual Pitt, the real Pittsburgh hospital that doubles as a key location in the show. It’s part of our ongoing series on the intersection of arts and health, part of our Canvas coverage.

Noah Wyle, Actor: The moment everybody needed me the most, I wasn’t there. Couldn’t do it. I choked.

Geoff Bennett: In the final moments of season one of “The Pitt,” Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, played by Noah Wyle, delivers a wrenching emotional unraveling after an especially grueling shift in the E.R.

Dr. Brent Rau, Director of Emergency Medicine, Allegheny General Hospital: It’s the mental exhaustion, just seeing people on the worst day of their lives and trying their best to help with those people. Unfortunately, there’s also not a ton of time to sit down and kind of — grief until later maybe in your shift or maybe when you get home.

Geoff Bennett: For Dr. Brent Rau, the scene is more than just a compelling storyline. He’s lived it.

Dr. Brent Rau: Hello, sir. Hi, I’m Dr. Rau.

Geoff Bennett: Here at Pittsburgh’s Allegheny General Hospital, Dr. Rau is known as the real life Dr. Robby. He oversees the emergency department.

When you first saw “The Pitt,” what felt most true to your own experience?

Dr. Brent Rau: The raw emotions that they do show, especially in that first season. The things that I think a lot of us carry with us are probably more the losses, the downs, sights, sounds that you will never forget, screams that you will never forget. And, unfortunately, you kind of carry those with you. I think we all do in health care, especially in the emergency department.

Geoff Bennett: In the series, Allegheny General Hospital, the large nonprofit hospital on Pittsburgh’s North Side, becomes the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center.

The production team filmed the lobby and all the exterior shots on site. And those real-world details also informed the set back in Burbank.

Dr. Bobby Kapur, Chair of Emergency Medicine, Allegheny Health Network: There’s no soundtrack to the show. As soon as the show begins, you’re immersed in the emergency department. All the sounds and the voices and the bells and the whistles and the movement of patients on the gurneys is all you really hear. And so in that sense, it’s quite authentic and immersive.

It looks like we’re well staffed back here, though.

Woman: We are.

Geoff Bennett: Dr. Bobby Kapur oversees emergency medicine across 14 hospitals in the Allegheny Health Network. An E.R. physician for more than 20 years, Kapur has tracked Noah Wyle’s career since his own medical school days, when Wyle first appeared as Dr. John Carter on E.R.

Last year, he and his teenage son sat down together every Thursday night for the first season of “The Pitt.”

Noah Wyle: Well, your son Flynn is critically ill. And the longer that we wait, the worse this can get.

Dr. Bobby Kapur: Yes, we’d almost be like a commentator on an NFL football game. I’d sit down. And he would watch him. I’m like, I think they’re going to do this next. And then they’re going to do this. And after that, this will be the diagnosis. And, usually, I’d enjoy being right.

Geoff Bennett: Really?

(Laughter)

Dr. Bobby Kapur: And he’s like: “Oh, dad, you really know what you’re doing.”

Geoff Bennett: So it took “The Pitt” for your son to be impressed by what you do for a living?

(Laughter)

Dr. Bobby Kapur: Because I usually don’t really talk too much about it.

Kathy Sikora, Director of Emergency Services, Allegheny General Hospital: You know, all of a sudden, I have moms who never really talked about anything at home with their kids. And their kids really didn’t know what they did, nor did they care. Now they’re the big shot, right? They tell their friends at school about what their mom does in an emergency department.

Our registration census.

Geoff Bennett: Kathy Sikora is a registered nurse and oversees operations within the emergency department at Allegheny General. She’s the hospital’s own Dana Evans, the tough no-nonsense charge nurse on “The Pitt.”

Sikora met with Katherine LaNasa, the actress behind the character, during production of season two.

Is there a story or a storyline that really, for you, rang true?

Kathy Sikora: Well, met with Katherine LaNasa, as the role of Dana, was actually struck, I was too just a few short years ago, pretty severely, struck unexpectedly, and still have residual issues, right, with concussion.

But that’s an issue that we face across the country in emergency departments. Most of the work force in the United States doesn’t expect to come to work and be abused, either physically or verbally, but unfortunately that’s our harsh reality.

Actress: What are you going to do to protect the rest of us?

Actress: Violence against health care workers is a national problem.

Actor: And it’s only getting worse.

Geoff Bennett: Sikora says many of her patients’ frustrations stemmed from long wait times. Allegheny General had the city’s longest last year, and the crowded waiting room depicted on the show and seen daily in real life became a defining image.

Kathy Sikora: You truly need to be a Green Beret to work in a busy waiting room. As you can imagine, you saw the waiting room in “The Pitt.”

Geoff Bennett: Right.

Kathy Sikora: That was my waiting room.

Katherine Lanasa, Actress: Where do you people think you are, huh? This ain’t Philly.

Geoff Bennett: After a $45 million revamp, Sikora says those issues are far more manageable.

Kathy Sikora: We’re starting patients in our initial waiting room, and then we’re getting them right back really quickly, getting all their tests started and then progressing them along. So no longer are they coming to one waiting room and sitting there.

Geoff Bennett: She says it’s a costly renovation to the urban hospital that “The Pitt” helped justify.

Kathy Sikora: Everyone already knew that to do something in our existing space on our city block here in Pittsburgh on the North Side, we were going to have to spend a good deal of money. What I think the show helped do by what it showed was actually validate what everyone really already knew that we needed to do and spend.

Woman: “The Pitt” is the best medical show that I have ever seen.

Geoff Bennett: Outside the walls of Allegheny General, the show’s realism has connected with health care workers across the country.

Man: I freaking love it.

Woman: Almost a little too real, honestly, a little too real.

Geoff Bennett: That realism is the product of a deliberate collaboration. Each scene is filmed with an E.R. doctor on set guiding the production team through the details of emergency care.

Dr. Christopher Morris, Emergency Room Doctor, Allegheny General Hospital: The insurance companies are not going to give you an issue.

Geoff Bennett: Dr. Christopher Morris, an E.R. physician at Allegheny General, consulted actress Fiona Dourif who plays Dr. Cassie McKay, on a scene that he’s faced many times throughout his 10-year career.

Fiona Dourif, Actress: What’s her name?

Dr. Christopher Morris: A car pulled up into the front of the hospital and it was a female that was unresponsive, presumably from an overdose. And Fiona said she was going to check the pupils, so she wanted me to show her how to do that.

Fiona Dourif: Pupils, pinpoint. I need…

Actor: Narcan.

Dr. Christopher Morris: Says, OK, I have to give Narcan in the scene. How do I do this? So I kind of showed her how to do an internasal Narcan. And the director was like, OK, Dr. Morris, now, how would you pull this young female out of the car? I said, I would just pull her out of the car like any other person would do, you know?

Fiona Dourif: They’re not responding to Narcan. We might need to intubate.

Geoff Bennett: Showcasing this authenticity and medical skill comes at a critical time. After a pandemic that drove physician burnout to its highest level in a decade, rates remain alarmingly high.

In emergency departments today, nearly half of all doctors report feeling symptoms of burnout.

Dr. Brent Rau: You know, one day you would walk outside and there’s people holding up signs thanking heroes, and then, two weeks later, you turn on TV and there’s people throwing eggs at physicians walking to the hospital because they’re all part of some hoax.

Protesters: No more shots!

Geoff Bennett: That backlash against medical science is among the storylines explored in the show’s first season.

Actress: He already looks better.

Noah Wyle: He is not. And by refusing the spinal tap, we don’t know how to help him.

Geoff Bennett: How does having a TV show that’s based on your hospital, how does that amplify the work that you do?

Dr. Bobby Kapur: It boosts the morale and the pride of the people that are working in the emergency department and also in emergency medicine across the country. I think it really does show that the work that’s being done in the emergency department is quite heroic still.

Man: Noah Wyle.

(Cheering)

Geoff Bennett: Another morale boost came in September with an Emmy dedicated to them by the show’s star.

Noah Wyle: To anybody who’s going on shift tonight or coming off shift tonight, thank you for being in that job. This is for you.

(Cheering)

Dr. Brent Rau: It’s exciting just to be able to see how people can appreciate a little bit more of what we do.

Geoff Bennett: Right.

Dr. Brent Rau: This was sent to me by my friend afterwards.

Geoff Bennett: I mean, that’s uncanny actually.

Dr. Brent Rau: Yes.

Geoff Bennett: And for Dr. Rau, one extra perk.

Dr. Brent Rau: And, listen, I’m glad that there’s a good-looking guy playing me on TV.

(Laughter)