I selected to watch the first episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” for this assignment requiring observation of how healthcare providers and patient relationships are portrayed and looking out for any communication issues. This episode follows new surgical interns as they endure their first 48-hour shift at Seattle Grace Hospital. They work under the guidance of head residents and attending surgeons who assign each intern to a different situation as he or she learns to care for patients in an unfamiliar environment.
The protagonist character is a surgical intern by the name of Meredith Gray. She works under Dr. Bailey who instructs her to care for a teen patient named Katie who has been life-flighted and is having unexplained seizures. Meredith talks to Katie about how she has been feeling and gets to know more about her life as a pageant girl doing rhythmic gymnastics. This conversation in which Meredith gained information about her patient outside of her medical record later enabled Meredith and her fellow intern Christina to determine that Katie’s fall in a recent competition caused a subarachnoid hemorrhage. This discovery saved Katie’s life as she was able to undergo a corrective neurosurgery.
Another instance of communication between provider and patient during the episode that caught my attention was when an intern named George spoke with a patient and his family prior to a bypass heart surgery. George promised the patient Tony and his wife that they should have absolutely no worries and that Tony would come out fine following surgery. Some unfortunate complications occurred, and Tony ended up dying during the operation. The attending doctor that George had been working with then had to explain to George how one should never promise anything to a patient and/or his family. False reassurance and empty promises destroy the patient-provider relationship. In order to understand the consequences of his choices, Dr. Burke made George personally break the tragic news of Tony’s death to his wife and children.
One last event in the episode that I found really intriguing was an interaction between an intern named Alex and an emergency department nurse. The nurse had a patient with a post-op complication of shortness of breath. Without doing any diagnostic tests or thoroughly doing an assessment of the patient himself, Alex arrogantly instructed the nurse to administer antibiotics to treat pneumonia. When the nurse tried to advocate for her patient, Alex brushed her off in a demeaning manner and expressed his distaste for all those in the nursing profession. As the patient showed no signs of improvement with the antibiotics, the leading Dr. Richard corrected Alex, and Meredith explained the correct procedures that should have been taken to make an accurate diagnosis. Despite the nurse’s efforts to converse with Alex and provide her patient with the highest quality of care, Alex’s arrogance, disrespect of another on the healthcare team, and lack of direct communication with the patient led to a decreased quality of care.