Dr Christopher Peters provides an insight into life behind the scenes as a TV medical advisor for leading programmes such as Eastenders and Holby City.
It is a favourite pastime of anyone who works in healthcare to scoff at the mistakes we see when medicine is portrayed on film. From the back-to-front chest X-ray on Scrubs to the miraculous success rates of chest compressions in soaps we love to mock. However, for the last four years I have been working with various TV programmes to try to inject a degree of realism without dampening the drama.
This started with Holby City when I helped out on set, making sure that operating scenes looked realistic and that the actors could pass off as surgeons. This was my introduction to the tension between realism and plot. Being a medical drama, Holby had the budget and resources to try and get things right, but even they couldn’t keep viewers interested if they showed a lovely routine list of day cases where nothing goes wrong! (more…)