Code Black

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steppwolf

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New documentary film on life in the ER at LA County, now showing in NYC and LA. Anyone see it? How is it?
 
RustedFox said:
Really, this. I never, ever want to "go to a theatre" again.
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Do so at your own risk. If it happened to Eddie Vedder, it could happen to you, too. Just sayin'...


 
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steppwolf said:
New documentary film on life in the ER at LA County, now showing in NYC and LA. Anyone see it? How is it?
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I've seen it and really enjoyed it. It manages to stay realistic to what it's like to work in a busy ER, with all it's frustrations and yet also to be accessible and enjoyable to the general public. Very well made, IMHO.
 
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Great Film.

If any of you guys haven’t seen the C-Booth Documentary concept that Code Black was based on:



“It’s like standing on the train tracks waiting for the train to come, and it comes."
 
Way to go McGarry. Get loud. I hope you see this. :highfive:
 
Just went to see it this past weekend. It was pretty good content wise, although I didn't like the way it was edited (everyone is going to disagree with me on this. Oh well.)
Still- I highly recommend it
 
I've spent my career at county hospital ED's. I wasn't happy with the portrayal of Emergency Medicine - cowboys, etc. I've found EP's to mostly be thoughtful, caring, and cautious, not extreme athletes and playboys.

My guess was that class of EM residents rotated at the old LAC when they were med students, matched there, and did their transitional years elsewhere. When they got to the EM2 year, LAC had moved to the new hospital. To their surprise, they couldn't be the cowboys they hoped to be - they had to follow rules, get consent, fill out forms, be compliant w/ JACO, pay attention to privacy, etc…

All of these are normal, appropriate parts of medicine, and I thought the residents seemed whiny.
 
dotcb said:
I've spent my career at county hospital ED's. I wasn't happy with the portrayal of Emergency Medicine - cowboys, etc. I've found EP's to mostly be thoughtful, caring, and cautious, not extreme athletes and playboys.

My guess was that class of EM residents rotated at the old LAC when they were med students, matched there, and did their transitional years elsewhere. When they got to the EM2 year, LAC had moved to the new hospital. To their surprise, they couldn't be the cowboys they hoped to be - they had to follow rules, get consent, fill out forms, be compliant w/ JACO, pay attention to privacy, etc…

All of these are normal, appropriate parts of medicine, and I thought the residents seemed whiny.
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I wanted to see this movie, but reading your interpretation made me really want to see this movie.
 
I hope this is a much better movie than, "Code Brown: Tales of a Drunk College Student".
 
Seems interesting. I left LAC+USC before they moved to the new hospital so I was trying to figure out when this was filmed (mostly did they basically recreate c-booth rather than make things roomier, seems like something the board of supervisors would approve though).
 
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dpmd said:
Seems interesting. I left LAC+USC before they moved to the new hospital so I was trying to figure out when this was filmed (mostly did they basically recreate c-booth rather than make things roomier, seems like something the board of supervisors would approve though).
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Hi. Current LAC+USC DEM volunteer here.

I think your question is about the current layout of the resuscitation area. If not, please disregard.

In Resusc there are 12 rooms, most in pairs separated by curtains. 2 are iso rooms. We do still run out of both rooms and space in the room. 🙁
 
eqkc said:
Hi. Current LAC+USC DEM volunteer here.

I think your question is about the current layout of the resuscitation area. If not, please disregard.

In Resusc there are 12 rooms, most in pairs separated by curtains. 2 are iso rooms. We do still run out of both rooms and space in the room. 🙁
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Yup, that was it. I saw the curtains and the people behind the wall up on the observation bench so I thought they recreated it exactly (with the one big bay with curtains). Pairs make more sense. Of course, I can picture the gurneys stacked up along whatever configuration of hallway they have in there just like old times.
 
Saw this over the weekend. Only about an hour long, definitely geared more towards the public. Thought it was a good piece with regards to creating dialogue between physicians, the public and other cohorts. It seemed like they were doing a ton of paperwork--could some of this just be due to their charting system?

Also, it really made me want to do a rotation at LAC lol.
 
PSA: "Code Black" is coming to DVD 2/24/2015!!
Preorder available on Amazon: http://amzn.com/B00P05SOT4
5146sz8QffL.jpg
 
I enjoyed the film, but not as much as I had hoped. I rotated at USC as an MS4 and liked the program, the people, the faculty, and even their new ED at the time. Still, the senior residents and the faculty could only talk about how great EM used to be at the old county hospital. I think McGarry was a PGY2 at the time and was working on the film.

The problem I had with the film, that some others shared with me after they saw it at ACEP Chicago, was that the first part of the film seems like an advertisement or a self-aggrandizing piece about their residency. The remainder of the film, while often touching and good at expressing some of the frustrations with working in a constantly bogged down county ED, focused on how all the residents are stuck doing charts and paperwork. Again, this is in contrast to the old ways at county, where they admit to having no rules, JCAHO looked the other way on all their violations, and virtually no charting. The crappy reality check is that our healthcare model now demands thorough and detailed charting, if not for legal purposes, but for billing purposes. This likely was less of an issue in the old days with how the county was funded and reimbursed. When I rotated there, I was aghast at how LITTLE they actually did chart for each patient. In relative terms, they felt it was a true bane to do any charting at all. For the rest of us, it comes across as whiny, as someone else already posted, since almost all of us are stuck in charting hell for a good portion of our shift (unless you have a scribe.)

As a tangent, the film to some extent does a better job of indirectly commenting on how our specialty has changed as a whole over the last several decades. Even in the 24/7/365 film, they talk about early EDs, where interns would run it, and as time went on our specialty was born, but still had an air of cowboy feel to it. How many of us would love to go back to the day when you had free reign to pretty much do anything you could imagine to resuscitate a patient or fix an acute surgical problem with whatever was in your pocket at the time? And on top of that, to have minimal to no charting. I would have thrived in the old system, where patient satisfaction was ignored in favor practicing medicine at warp speed and managing truly sick patients, and I'm sure most of you would agree.

Alright, end of rant. Movie is worth seeing, just wasn't as good as I had hoped. Someone needs to take the prime bits and pieces from Code Black, The Waiting Room, and 24/7/365 and make something magical. We're a tough crowd to please....

And last I heard, there might be Oscar buzz on this, so what do I know??
 
Dane07MD said:
...this is in contrast to the old ways at county, where they admit to having no rules, JCAHO looked the other way on all their violations, and virtually no charting.
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Really? They admit this as much on film, openly? Lol. I haven't seen the film but if all that was admitted, that seems like bait for lawyers to troll the last few years of charts for easy pickin's. But you're right, that's not going to fly nowadays in 99% percent of job settings.
 
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I felt like Code Black was meant for a medical layperson. It was entertaining enough, but I learned nothing from the movie (aside from LA residency info).
 
.
 
Rotated at USC/LAC as a medstud in the old hospital, when the C-booth was in it's glory. In one shift, saw seven (unrelated) shootings, two thoracotomies, and a homeless dude who thought all the maggots infesting his foot stumps were little robots controlled by radio signals from the government. Didn't see Code Black, but I will if it hits Netflix. There was a cowboy attitude there, but I saw this in a positive "no fear", "can handle anything" position, not a "don't know what I'm doing, but I'll stick a needle in it". Length of training + New England spouse put the kibosh on applying there for rez, otherwise I woulda.

Update: was able to watch it.

I sort of agree with a lot of other posters who saw the film as a statement on the transition from no charting, no paperwork, no privacy in the old building, to a modern building with paperwork requirements.

Listen, if I could get away with just treating patients and do minimal/no paperwork, I would, too. It's a fact of life that that's what it will be like when you graduate and get a real job. Better to get used to it now then when someone's looking at your dispo times and RVU's.

It's kind of weird, though, that the amount of paperwork is more than what they were used to, but a lot more than most places I've trained/worked at in the last 7-8 years and experience currently. A lot of those forms should either be electronic or printable on demand.

It was nice to see C-booth again, though.
 
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CajunMedic said:
So apparently, CBS took this idea and turned it into a drama. This popped up on my YouTube today.

http://www.cbs.com/shows/code-black/
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I was about to say this looks really well done until I got to the part where the kid says "I hear you daddy" while listening to the heartbeat of a another child who has her father's transplanted heart...also the EM resident performing a C-section in the back of an ambulance. Regardless, it looks better than NBC's "Night Shift".
 
tkim said:
Rotated at USC/LAC as a medstud in the old hospital, when the C-booth was in it's glory. In one shift, saw seven (unrelated) shootings, two thoracotomies, and a homeless dude who thought all the maggots infesting his foot stumps were little robots controlled by radio signals from the government. Didn't see Code Black, but I will if it hits Netflix. There was a cowboy attitude there, but I saw this in a positive "no fear", "can handle anything" position, not a "don't know what I'm doing, but I'll stick a needle in it". Length of training + New England spouse put the kibosh on applying there for rez, otherwise I woulda.
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Funny because I rotated there last year and aside from a REBOA saw nothing except a ton of MVAs and inebriated homeless. No GSWs, no thoracotomies. Ah.. guess LA ain't what it used to be.

Still a great program though.
 
I rotated there recently too and saw 2 thoracotomies that came in about 3 hours apart. Saw 2 GSW's from a group shooting and a bad stabbing. On another shift they were tubing multiple people simultaneously that came in from a fire. Of course, lots of poly-trauma MVA's too. Still lots of action in resus, but the layout has changed to the pod system so it doesn't look as cool as c-booth. I feel pods made for a worse experience for med students because you can't just jump in on resus'ing sick patients since you might be assigned to one of the other pods. However, pods seem to be much better for resident learning. Also if patients in our pod were stable, the resident would let us sneak over to resus to see if there were cool cases going down. Also the more senior EM residents run the in-hospital codes and going to those with them was pretty neat too. For me I was worried because I didn't see as many medically sick patients compared to other programs, but I traded some of the north shifts for resus shifts. I have heard from others that they saw pretty sick patients when rotating on the north pod.
 
dpmd said:
Yeah, I mean at least he was probably willing to get rid of them because who wants government controlled robots up in their ****.
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I'd much prefer they log all my phone calls, monitor all my cellular and wifi activity and carry out summary executions with drones.






.





Well, by golly, lucky me! (Hurry, where's my tin foil hat?!!!!)
 
You can buy the documentary online for about $10 through Amazon. It's instant access. The documentary was pretty good, in my opinion.
 
I think you can rent it on YouTube.

I watched it. Overall really good. Amazed at their insane wait times. Doesn't make them look good at all in my opinion.

I did my residency at a level one trauma center and the wait times are nowhere near the insanely long wait times they mentioned in the movie.
 
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Angry Birds said:
I think you can rent it on YouTube.

I watched it. Overall really good. Amazed at their insane wait times. Doesn't make them look good at all in my opinion.

I did my residency at a level one trauma center and the wait times are nowhere near the insanely long wait times they mentioned in the movie.
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It has to do with the crazy high amount of patients coming through (both emergent and stupid ****) combined with being a county facility so there is someone holding purse strings that cares more about the budget than wait times. You think the ER wait times are bad, how about waiting days or more than a week waiting for surgery on your fracture or acute chole.
 
Loved!!! that movie
 
Just saw it on the internet for free. Yay internet. Anyway, love the realism. Healthcare sucks in this country, period. But, I'd still like to become a doctor with the hope that sanity will eventually prevail and that I'll be able to use my training to its full potential.
 
zero0 said:
Just saw it on the internet for free. Yay internet. Anyway, love the realism. Healthcare sucks in this country, period. But, I'd still like to become a doctor with the hope that sanity will eventually prevail and that I'll be able to use my training to its full potential.
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1.) Nice avi.
2.) Link, please.
 
TheBlueBlazer said:
The TV show is absolutely f*cking horrible.
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Couldn't agree more. Gave it a shot and quickly regretted it...story lines like an EM intern going to a patient's house because she missed a diagnosis and ending up doing a crash c-section in the ambulance on the freeway just weren't doing it for me. Of course the mother and baby survived it. I guess I shouldn't be surprised by these types of things, though...
 
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