Who doesn’t love Scrubs? Although a comedy show, I think this programme excellently captures many aspects of the intensity, difficulty, and satisfaction of hospital life. It paints the doctors, nurses, patients and porters as hilarious exaggerations of people we’ve all met on the wards. Anyone know a doctor with a narcissistic god-complex like Dr Cox? Or a nurse trying desperately not to sell out her peers as she climbs the career ladder like Carla? Anyway, I remember watching DVD’s of this show every evening  in my third year on my first clinical out-block: it certainly made the long days filled with surgery and ward-work a lot easier knowing that JD, Turk, Carla and Elliot were going through the same thing, and were surviving.  

1.       Try to keep everyone on side. Hospitals can be territorial places; people tend to stick in their own cliques; the medics, the nurses, and the Serco staff. But it’s still so important for everyone to get along together, for the good of the patients and for a much nicer working environment. A great example of dysfunctional team work is JD and the Janitor’s relationship, where a perceived minor indiscretion from JD leads to years of relentless torment from the Janitor. This results in both of them losing hours of work, as the janitor sets up elaborate traps for JD, who then has to deal with the consequences for these. Although no-one in your hospital is going to torment you so extremely if you make a minor mistake (I hope!), this vignette demonstrates the need for good communication so all members of the team can develop a strong rapport and appreciation of one another.

2.       Don’t sell yourself out: remember why we started doing this. One of the most profound lessons I learnt from Scrubs comes from one of its goofier characters who doesn’t even work in the hospital. In “My Brother, Where Art Thou?”, JD’s brother Dan notices that his little sibling deals with an elderly patient with dementia in a very cavalier and unsympathetic manner, a far cry from the sensitive, caring doctor he knew him to be. Although working in a hospital can feel like a war-zone at times, with money, resources, appreciation and time all too limited, we need to remember why we started this job so we don’t become jaded and lose our job satisfaction, as that can surely only lead to burn-out, stress and depression.  

3.       Everyone has to deal with a difficult superior; it may be hard but you can learn from them. Dr Cox and Dr Kelso are both mean senior doctors, taking every opportunity to ridicule JD and Elliot in the first few seasons. But guess what: the two of them learn loads, and Elliot even admits in one episode that she is a much better doctor because of Kelso pushing her so hard. Now I’m not encouraging workplace bullying or ward-rounds where there is teaching by humiliation, just that we should look on the bright side if we have a mean boss. I feel that I’m always pushed hardest by the doctors who expect me to know more and push me a little further, rather than those who are nice but indifferent to me.

4.       Everyone needs a break from the hospital. Do you remember the episode where Elliot (helped by Dr Cox) has a sudden and horrible realisation that the only reason she is in a relationship with Keith is because he is the only young, single male in the hospital? As medics we have an excellent attitude to work and will go the extra mile to attend the wards and look after our patients, but we still need to take time for ourselves. Although having a fellow medic as a partner is not necessarily a bad thing (they know your career demands, they understand your after work rants without any jargon-translation), it’s always a good idea to keep a few non-medic friends or else you can end up becoming very introspective and a bit narrow-minded. Remember: there’s a whole wide world out there outside of medicine as well!

5.       We’re doctors, not superheroes; we’ll still get sick. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel that I can’t or shouldn’t get ill because I’m training to a doctor and can understand pathology and deal with it daily. Weird I know, but I’m not the only one. In Scrubs, Carla finds it really hard to admit her post-natal depression to anyone, feeling like she shouldn’t be affected by it, and Dr Cox finds it really difficult to deal with his baby girl’s illness. Ironically, as the people who know the system inside out and what it can do for us, we can be the last people to use it. But when we do, like Carla and Dr Cox, we can find the situation gets a lot better a lot better a lot quickly.

I hope that you enjoyed my philosophical foray into the world of Sacred Heart Hospital, and have realised that watching medical television shows is not an idle use of time, rather a breeding ground for reflection ;-) . Please comment below on your favourite episodes of Scrubs and anything that you may have learnt from them.

Thanks for reading,

Chantelle