Tech on TV – ER Doctors on Call
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By :
Jenny Kettlewell
Submitted
2010-03-12 08:47:55 |
In U.S. hospitals, resident doctors are frequently on call for more than 80 hours a week, and in the long running and award winning medical drama, ER, we get a sense of this burden and strain. The hospital asks a lot of the characters in the Emergency Room, with the County General paging system constantly interrupting the lives of its staff and their pager tones and ruining their day.
Their pagers wake them when they re catching forty winks on a gurney in an exam room after pulling an all night shift. Their pager alarms send them racing along the green hallways to save a life. Our favourite doctors, like John Carter, Mark Green, Abby Lockhart and Greg Pratt, are at the hospital paging system’s beck and call to the point that their pagers have even become essential to the drama.
Paging Doctor Carter
In the second season, the intern Carter is elated to discover he has been nominated for his ‘match’ at County General, meaning he will be able to stay there for the next stage in his medical career. To celebrate, Carter jumps in a hot tub with a girlfriend and cracks open a bottle of champagne. That’s when their pagers bleep, calling them back to the hospital, but Carter is obviously tipsy and is unable to treat patients. For this transgression, he gets suspended.
Carter has to confess “I can’t believe I was that stupid to sneak off and drink on call.”
His loveable superior Mark Green then replies: “I can: you’re a medical student.”
Kerry Weaver & Authority
We continually see both the ER staff’s dependency on, and dislike of, their pagers; but early in ER s eighth season there was an episode that shows how essential the paging systems are to the hierarchical chain of command in hospitals – at least in the world of the cult TV show.
Kerry Weaver is away from the Emergency Room dealing with personal issues, and when Doctors Chen and Malucci need her help and supervision over a failing patient, they bleep her pager over and over. Eventually Carter finds her in the cafe across the road, but it is too late and the patient dies. She then covers up her culpability by blaming her subordinates for the death. Malpractice suits, demotion, redundancies, and wrongful dismissal litigation then follow for the three doctors involved.
Heart Breaker
But there is one scene one of the most memorable in the whole fifteen years of the show where something as mundane as wireless technology is used as a climax to a heart rending episode. After a long, hard, “Night Shift” (1997), paramedics wheel in a patient in critical condition, a jumper pulled from the Chicago railway lines.
A nurse immediately gets on the hospital paging system to rouse the surgery staff covering the E.R.: Carter, Gant, and their superior, Dr Peter Benton. Benton quickly gets to work on the mauled body, which is so caked with blood that you can t tell the clothes from the flesh. The room is noisy with agitated voices, frantic activity and the electronic tones of the machines. Carter rushes in to assist, but his troubled friend Gant does not show promptly and so Benton is quick to admonish his least favoured intern.
Page him again , and that s when, in all the clamour of the Emergency Room, they begin to notice a ringing tone. One by one, they pause to locate the sound, and in that moment of stillness, a nurse pulls a ringing pager from the pocket of the suicide victim. The pager s tone had been ringing for minutes unheard, and as it is silenced we learn that Dr Benton s vindictive and sustained bullying of his overworked intern Gant, has had a fatal outcome. Chilling stuff.
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Author Resource:-
Jenny Kettlewell is the Marketing Manager for Multitone Systems, a telecommunications strategy company that has implemented paging systems (http://www.multitonesystems.co.uk/paging.html) and provided pagers for organisations in the public and private sector for many years.
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