A young patient enters a hospital emergency room with vague abdominal pain. Almost immediately the ailment is diagnosed and the need for an organ transplant is determined. The patient hovers near death, an organ suddenly is found, and a full recovery occurs – all within the span of a one-hour TV show... it’s good entertainment, but is it true to life?
That’s the dilemma that HRSA and other federal health officials try to resolve through a cooperative agreement with Hollywood, Health & Society (HH&S), a project of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Norman Lear Center. HH&S links public health officials and medical experts to entertainment industry writers and producers in an effort to make sure health-based TV dramas use accurate and up-to-date information.
“The arrangement offers HRSA a chance to correct misinformation before it reaches tens of millions of TV viewers and an opportunity to advance important organ donation messages,” said Joyce Somsak, Associate Administrator for Healthcare Systems.
The agreement reflects the entertainment industry’s pervasive influence in the way the public learns about vital health issues. According to a 2001 Health-Styles survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than half of regular prime time and daytime drama viewers said they learned something about a disease or how to prevent it from a TV show. About a third of regular viewers said they took some action after hearing about a health issue or disease on a TV show.
And that’s a problem when the truth about a health issue may not be as entertaining as fiction. If fictional television shows are a major way the public learns about health, misinformation could lead to adverse health outcomes.
HRSA officials’ main interaction with HH&S has been in the very dramatic issue of organ donation, since alarmist – and incorrect – episodes about body snatching or organ harvesting could diminish public support for donation. In several shows dealing with organ donation, HRSA officials have given HH&S accurate information about the donation process and identified other experts whom screenwriters can talk to on donation-related topics. Jim Burdick, M.D., Director of the Division of Transplantation in HRSA’s Healthcare System Bureau and a transplant surgeon himself, often has served as an expert consultant to HH&S.
The recent primetime TV dramas the Division of Transplantation staff has consulted with HH&S on include: ER, House, Grey’s Anatomy, CSI Miami, Numb3rs, and Medium. They also have provided valuable health education information to soap operas such as All My Children, General Hospital, One Life to Live and The Young & The Restless.
Besides HRSA, HH&S receives support from other HHS agencies: CDC, the NIH, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. HRSA’s participation in the cooperative agreement began in FY 2005.
HRSA’s decision to work with HH&S occurred at the same time an agency-supported study by Purdue University monitoring media portrayal of organ donation found the public held these erroneous beliefs:
- Between 50 percent and 80 percent of people believe there is a black market for organs in the United States. The truth is there is no black market.
- About 50 percent of respondents believe that it is possible to recover from brain death. The truth? Unlike coma, no one recovers from brain death.
- About 75 percent believe that the medical and organ allocation system can’t be trusted to be fair. In reality, the U.S. transplant system operates by very specific policies with oversight from HRSA.
- About 14 percent of people fear that they won’t be saved or that doctors will take their organs before they are dead. The truth: Nothing could be further from the truth. The team trying to save an individual’s life has only one goal, to save the person’s life. The transplant team is totally separate from the medical team and is called in only after all life-saving measures have been exhausted.
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