Phil: Oh no! Ruby isn’t breathing! She’s choked on her vomit! I know, I’ll blow into her mouth once, slap her in the face, then drive all the way to Walford General with her still not breathing.
Mark, watching Eastenders: Aargh! You can’t do that! Call the ambulance! Clear the airway! Do compressions! Aargh!
I wish people on TV would do first aid properly. I know it’s an accurate reflection of the general public, who often don’t do it properly, but untrained people often copy what they’ve seen on TV, and if they copy this, they may well find a dead “Ruby” on their hands.
Still, he at least he didn’t come out with the “ambulance, Albert Squaaaah, naaaah! *click*” line so often heard on Eastenders.
January 14th, 2006 at 2:08 am
Even I, with no first aid training, knew that it was all wrong. Eastenders is not best know for its accurate portrayal of reality, and that is usually why I love it so.
Hark at my mocking laughter, until of course, you are right and someone thinks it was the right way to save someone who had downed a bottle of vodka.
Then again, they will proabably just sue the show.
January 14th, 2006 at 2:15 am
I had to laugh at your post Mark - but what you say is so true. And people do take people to hospital in their own car that aren’t breathing.
I fully agree with you that programmes like this should take on a more educational role - even if it’s in a subliminal sense.
It’s amazing what people learn without realising, and if it’s the wrong thing, it can be a bloody nightmare when we arrive and start doing it correctly because the public then swear blind we’re doing it wrong because they’ve seen different on the telly.
January 14th, 2006 at 3:00 am
I agree, totally!! What got me, was the fact that her nails were so nice and clean, not a drop of carrot/pea vomit over her top and full make up on! That never happens to the drunks i see out on the street! (and as far as i could tell was’nt incontinent!)
What else i find totally hilarious is that id much prefer to drink a whole bottle of vodka and vomit all over myself 20 time over than have phil mitchell give me mouth to mouth!
January 14th, 2006 at 3:28 am
I once went to a woman in cardiac arrest where another woman was doing what she thought was cpr, as she’d seen it done on tv - holding her wrist with two fingers.
January 14th, 2006 at 4:08 am
was once teaching infant CPR to the mother of one of our fragile neonates, when the four year old brother lay on the floor and started thumping his own chest! When asked what he was doing, he said he knew what to do if someone had died becasue he had seen it on t.v.!
January 14th, 2006 at 10:38 am
mmm. My mum watches Coronation Street a lot and she used to always point out when they’d got some “public education” message underlying the storyline. Like when Rita nearly died of carbon monoxide poisoning or whatever.
Soaps can be very influential in the way people act, even if the viewers don’t realise that soaps are affecting them that way. At least with the medical dramas (Casualty et al) they do have medical professionals working on the show to advise them on the way things should be done. I’m not sure if Eastenders takes such care over its storylines? True, it might have looked slightly odd if Mr Mitchell had suddenly started doing proper textbook BLS… especially since it would have taken a while longer than the few seconds of the show that the producers wanted it to take up… but he could have at least called an ambulance and taken instructions from the EMD just as any untrained layperson should…?
January 14th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
I guess Phil wouldn’t have looked like such a hero if he’d been taking instructions from someone. Perhaps he could have done resus properly and later explain that he knew what to do because he’d seen it on Casualty?
January 14th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
He would of phone for an ambulance but Homo sapiens neanderthalensis has trouble pressing the buttons on modern phones with its oversized stubby fingers. Also the chances of it reaching a member of its own subspecies and as such being able to communicate is very low (unless by some fluke he got accidently connected to the Essex Ambulance Service).
January 14th, 2006 at 9:29 pm
I don’t watch Eastenders, but maybe one approach would be to show him acting realistically (i.e. screwing up the CPR) and then showing the realistic consequences of this (Ruby dying). Given my understanding of the death toll in Albert Square, there should be ample opportunities for such a story…
January 15th, 2006 at 12:01 am
Steve said: we arrive and start doing it correctly … the public then swear blind we’re doing it wrong because they’ve seen different on the telly
People are nuts.
January 15th, 2006 at 8:25 pm
We have the same problem as midwives… on TV, birth goes like this:
1. Waters go.
2. Woman needs to push, maybe has one or two contractions.
3a (in case of Holby City) baby’s heartbeat is ‘dangerously low’.
3b. Baby is born. Usually pink, clean and chubby.
Most of the stuff you see about birth on TV is rubbish, ER the other day was ok (they made it clear that you couldn’t force a woman to have a caesarean) but also bad (breech births are all dangerous and uncontrolled).
A mate had a woman who needed to go to theatre during labour… as they wheeled her in she was yelling ‘don’t take me to theatre, in Holby they always die if they get taken to theatre’…
January 15th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
On Casualty yesterday they managed to get an ambulance just by giving a road name.Do they nt have a priority dispatch system in Holby?
Oh and Mark - I know who you are!!!
January 15th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
No way! How did you work it out?
(Although last time someone said they knew who I was, they were so far off the mark that I nearly fell off my chair!)
January 16th, 2006 at 11:28 am
I was very glad to see him chided at the hospital though: Next time, call an ambulance
January 17th, 2006 at 6:18 pm
I once had a woman call as her mother was in Cardiac arrest. I started to give CPR instructions only for her to scream down the phone at me that she kne what she was doing as she had seen it on casualty. She then hung up the phone and I could not re-connect to her! The crew were about ten mins away, needless to say, the pt was no longer viable by the time the crew arrived!
These kind of people drive me to drink!
February 13th, 2006 at 11:31 am
Anyone seen the ‘CPR’ on Jurassic Park? Made me cringe!
March 31st, 2006 at 1:48 pm
i am not very happy about this website it dont tell me any thing
March 31st, 2006 at 3:01 pm
Erm… what did you want it to tell you? As far as I can see, it tells you lots of things.
(And it’s “doesn’t”, not “don’t”).