Cardiac Arrest

by reestheskin on 27/06/2017

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Jed Mecurio was on Desert Island Discs. He of ‘Cardiac Arrest’ fame. (ITU: they used to call it the ICU — intensive care unit — till they realised, nobody did). Something he said chimed with a conversation I had with somebody who knows a lot more about junior doctor training in the modern NHS than I do.

Mercurio, was the son of working class Italian immigrants. And, as is true of many immigrants, a child moving into the stable world of the professions is encouraged. Mercurio pointed out that the popular representation of medicine often does not match the reality. Those with family members already in medicine know this, whereas those without this, have to discover it (at least, I hope they discover it).

When I was trying to get a handle on some of the issues surrounding junior doctor training with my source, the very same point came up. Many junior docs idea of what medicine was like, he / she argued, was based on TV programs — and more Eastenders than West Wing. And this is a problem, he commented.

Cardiac Arrest may be showing its age, but for me it was more accurate than all the sanitised bumph that medical schools and the GMC produce. Fiction is sometimes more real than reality.