'Code Black' offers insider look at ED challenges
Dr. McGarry: One of the more surprising aspects of "Code Black" is the nostalgia factor, that fact that both physicians that have been working for awhile and those that have become administrators watched this film. We thought it would be offensive to them, especially people from private hospitals, whom we are sort of tough on in the movie. We thought that they would find us a little unrealistic and idealistic. Interestingly, they all watched it and they said, "I long for the day in my residency when all I had to worry about was just getting the science right, getting that patient connection right."
Question: Working in C-Booth was a great experience for ED physicians in training. Can you ever recapture that feeling in the new, heavily regulated environment?
Dr. McGarry: One thing we wouldn’t want to return to would be the lack of privacy. The biggest aspect of C-Booth that probably we wouldn’t be proud of would be the lack of privacy. I’m definitely for privacy and for a dignified experience. After that, I feel like things are quite undefined. I think we have expectations that technology, in particular, is a huge answer to medicine. But we know it can be expensive and it can be dangerous. And in the case of electronic medical records, it certainly doesn’t make things faster. We know that every institution that has gone from paper charts to an EMR has found not just an immediate slowing of care, but a permanent slowing. And yet there are benefits with being able to quickly look up old medical information. But what about when my patient is waiting 20 minutes for pain medicine because it takes almost that long to get them in the computer, pull up the order, select the medicine, and go through all these stupid hard stops that are built in. Before, I could just write it down on a piece of paper, communicate it to the nurse, and get it done. If you’re the one in pain, is that worth it? I don’t know.
Question: How did you find the time to make this movie?
Dr. McGarry: There were a lot of consequences there. I probably pushed it from a health perspective. I really found myself in a unique position as both a filmmaker and subject. For almost 3 years, I would do every ounce of my residency and then would race from the hospital to the edit room and would live and breathe it for 3 years. You would imagine there’s a cost to that. Lost a girlfriend. Didn’t sleep. Happily, I came through without any major damage, but that’s a heck of a lot of emergency medicine.
Question: What are you doing next? Are you working on another film and how are balancing that with your day job in medicine?
Dr. McGarry: This is a different game than it was in residency. I have an option for a scripted series, so basically it means that producers have identified it as a viable project for a fiction series like you would see on HBO. That’s in active development. We just shot a 3-minute spot with the New York and L.A. ballets, which involves these dancers in the old abandoned general hospital. As far as balancing all this, I’m so lucky in that. Cornell/New York Presbyterian and Dr. Neal Flomenbaum have been incredibly supportive of me and allowing me to be full time there, but with the work flexibility to jump on these projects as they come.
mschneider@frontlinemedcom.com
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