\n<\/p>\n
The emergency department waiting room was jammed, as it always is, with patients sitting for hours, closely packed on hard metal chairs. Only those with conditions so dire they needed immediate care \u2014 like a heart attack \u2014 got seen immediately.<\/p>\n
One man had had enough. He pounded on the glass window in front of the receptionist before storming out. As he left, he assaulted a nurse taking a smoking break. \u201cHard at work?\u201d he called, as he strode off.<\/p>\n
No, the event was not real, but it was art resembling life on \u201cThe Pitt,\u201d<\/a> the Max series that will stream its season finale on Thursday. The show takes place in a fictional Pittsburgh hospital\u2019s emergency room. But the underlying theme \u2014 appalling overcrowding \u2014 is universal in this country. And it is not easy to fix.<\/p>\n \u201cEDs are gridlocked and overwhelmed,\u201d the American College of Emergency Medicine reported<\/a> in 2023, referring to emergency departments.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe system is at the breaking point,\u201d said Dr. Benjamin S. Abella, chair of the department of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai\u2019s Icahn School of Medicine in New York.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Pitt\u201d follows emergency room doctors, nurses, medical students, janitors and staff hour by hour over a single day as they deal with all manner of medical issues, ranging from a child who drowned helping her little sister get out of a swimming pool to a patient with a spider in her ear. There were heart attacks and strokes, overdoses, a patient with severe burns, an influencer poisoned by heavy metals in a skin cream.<\/p>\n Because this is television, many of the thorny problems get neatly resolved in the show\u2019s 15 episodes. A woman who seems to have abandoned her elderly mother returns, apologizing because she fell asleep. Parents whose son died from an accidental fentanyl overdose come around to donating his organs. A pregnant teenager and her mother, at odds over a medical abortion, come to a resolution following a wise doctor\u2019s counsel.<\/p>\n But over and over again, the image is of a system working way beyond its capacity. There is the jammed waiting room and the \u201cboarders\u201d \u2014 patients parked in emergency rooms or hallways for days or longer because there are no hospital beds. (The American College of Emergency Physicians calls boarding<\/a> a \u201cnational public health crisis.\u201d)<\/p>\n There are the long waits for simple tests. There is the hallway medicine \u2014 patients who see a doctor in the hallway, not in a private area, because there is no place else to put them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n And there is the violence, verbal and physical, from patients with mental problems and those, like the man who punched the nurse, who just get fed up.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018The Pitt\u2019 shows the duress the system is under,\u201d Dr. Abella said. \u201cAcross the country we see this day in and day out.\u201d<\/p>\n But why can\u2019t this problem be fixed?<\/p>\n