by: Shannon Redmon @shannon_redmon
As a former healthcare professional for over twenty years, I often focus on the medical scenes in many books, television shows and movies. When hospital visits or emergency room drama is included in manuscripts, authors sometimes write these scenes incorrectly. I’ve rolled my eyes on more than one occasion when watching a medical episode or when reading a scenario in a book because the writer didn’t do their homework. Hopefully, the following tips will help.
1) Research
Few people, even medical professionals, understand the inner workings of every department or procedure in a hospital. There are too many protocols, policies, and exam types to get the details right on our own. Researching treatments, symptoms and tests are important when getting a scene correct. Even something as simple as how a patient is discharged from the hospital can be misrepresented if one doesn’t ask.
One of the best ways to research a medical procedure or trauma protocol is to interview a nurse, paramedic, EMT, or trauma physician. If we don’t have anyone like that in our circle of experts, then we can reach out to our writer networks. Many authors used to work in the medical field and are willing to offer accurate advice. Even if they don’t have the exact answer to the question, they have connections who do.
Medical websites today offer up-to-date true healthcare knowledge in regards to procedures or the steps followed in certain trauma scenarios, such as how a gunshot victim would be treated in the emergency room. Several sites also discuss types of drugs, how to administer them, how long they take before they interact, dosage, etc.
Use medical sites backed by a known healthcare facility. They hire staff who keep their information up to date. Below are some trusted places to conduct medical searches.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases
2) Update Medical Jargon
The language we use in medicine can be overwhelming, difficult to understand and often misrepresented in books, tv shows and movies but there’s good news when using this in writing. We can leave the medical jargon to a minimum!
Readers don’t want to read every detail of a complicated exam filled with difficult language from the most recent medical textbook. Too much advanced terminology will take the reader out of the story and give them a reason to close the book. Not what we want. So, keep it simple, to a minimum and accurate.
3) Doctors, doctors, everywhere
Something fascinates readers about doctors. They love to read about them. However, there are many other advanced professionals working with doctors to help them diagnose a patient’s condition. Medicine is a team effort, not a one-person show. Nurses, paramedics, imaging specialists, lab and medical assistants all work together to care for patients.
One TV show represented an emergency room (ER) doctor who treated his patients, then would observe their surgeries, conduct their medical and imaging tests, and basically follow them all over the hospital taking on new roles in different departments. This is not how doctors work in the real world. For example, an ER doctor remains in the ER. They don’t follow the patient to the radiology department to oversee or even perform a CAT scan or other procedures. Instead, they order exams, send the patient to the appropriate department, and treat many other patients in the meantime. When the report arrives in the patient’s electronic medical record, the ER doctor will get a notification, read the results, determine if more tests are needed, if the patient should be admitted to the hospital or if they can return home. They manage the patient’s care while assigned to them and in their department. If someone is on death’s door, then the doctor takes a more active role in providing life-saving care.
As for the milder cases or all the in between care provided to the patient, nurses are the hub of the activity and true professionals. The doctor will talk to the patient once maybe twice, then leave their orders for the nurses to carry out.
4) Digitized Records
Very little paper is used in today’s hospital systems. Paper charts, large file rooms, and doctors carrying clipboards are a thing of the past, but for some reason authors still write these into their stories.
All medical records are digitized, especially if they are associated with a hospital. Laptop computers and digital tablets are used in place of clipboards and paper forms. The only paper item given to a patient would be educational materials for them to read at home or a summary of their visit given at discharge. Healthcare professionals use a networked digital hospital system to view medical results, order drugs, submit summary notes, etc.
5) Love in Scrubs
Even though books are written with a medical romance, most healthcare professionals are not meeting up in supply closets to get a little loving. A hospital is filled with germs, body fluids, blood, vomit, and everything else disgusting. Sure, we have janitorial staff who clean, but those of us who have worked in these environments understand the nature of staph infections and communicable diseases that sometimes get missed. Trust me, we don’t want to expose nature to anything of the sort. Let your medical love birds do their kissing outside the hospital buildings.
6) Attitudes
When working in a large environment of people where lives are at risk, drama is bound to happen. Instead of creating implausible, over-the-top scenarios, focus on the real issues between the characters in the medical environment. Coworkers argue, patients code or die, families are distraught, workers get fired or go on strike, some doctors (not all) get frustrated and lash out at staff while others remain calm under any circumstance. There is plenty of action to fill the pages of a book.
With a little digging, research, and questioning, we can make our medical scenes reflect a true to life experience with plenty of interesting medical nuggets to keep readers turning the pages. This will make our stories more believable and help our characters
Shannon is a Publisher’s Weekly bestselling author and her greatest hope is for her stories to immerse readers into a world of suspense and escape while encouraging faith, hope, and love in Christ. She has three books published by Harlequin’s Love Inspired Suspense line–Cave of
Secrets, Secrets Left Behind and Mistaken Mountain Abduction. She is also one of the Managing Editors of Acquisitions for Spark Flash Fiction Magazine, where she received her first official published byline. Shannon is represented by Tamela Hancock Murray of the Steve Laube
Agency.
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