Diary of a Junior Doctor – now playing on TVNZ+ – needs to be added to your watch list immediately. It lifts the lid on what it’s really like to work in NZ’s biggest and busiest hospital, and, what it really takes to be a doctor. We chatted to Keriana Kingi-Nepe – one of the junior doctors – about the show, how it measures up to the fictional medical dramas we’ve watched too much of, and, just how challenging it is working in the healthcare sector right now…
As an elder millennial, for me it might have all started with Doogie Howser M.D,. Or maybe it was Shortland Street – with Dr. Hone Ropata, nurse Carrie Burton and paramedic Sam Aleni, to check in on every weeknight. From there, the obsession quickly moved to ER, then Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice – a brief dabble with Nip/Tuck and The Good Doctor – and then a long hiatus until my medical drama obsession came back with full force for The Pitt.
It’s a genre that has spurred so many unmissable, hit TV shows – and it’s kind of easy to see why. The high stress environment is the perfect little incubator for drama. It’s life and death, with a new drama only another ambulance arrival away – and that’s before you even get to the private lives of the people working in the hospital.
They’re lives we don’t often think about when we wind up in a doctor’s surgery – or the ER – the last thing we really want to ponder over is our doctor being a fallible human being like us. Our minds don’t want to ponder if they have a young baby keeping them up at night, a renovation bill getting out of control, or an argument with their husband on their mind – or, if they’ve been at work for 12 hours already.
Medical dramas lift that sheet, and we get to see who these people really are outside of the exam room.
And now, hot on the heels of the release of The Pitt, I have a new TV medical obsession – except with this one, it’s all 100% real. Diary of a Junior Doctor, playing on TVNZ, is set at NZ’s biggest and busiest hospital – Auckland’s Middlemore.
It follows five junior doctors inside and outside of the hospital – giving us a real insight into what it really takes to be a doctor, the massive hours they pull, the decisions they’re faced with and the sacrifices they make. It’s fascinating, stressful, heartbreaking and heartwarming – often, all within the same scene.
One of the first things I clocked though, was that none of the five young doctors are in a relationship with each other, or with anyone in the hospital. No one is working with their soon-to-be-ex-wife whilst flirting with their next wife. No one has survived a plane crash, helicopter crash or terrorist attack that claimed the lives of their colleagues/sister/best friend/lover or been replaced by their evil twin brother.
But real life is just as – perhaps even more – enthralling than the fiction I’ve mostly watched about hospital dramas.
After watching the first two episodes I had a quick call with one of the doctors on the show – Keriana Kingi-Nepe (Te Aitanga-a-HauitiNgati Porou, Hauraki Waikato,Ngāti Kahungunu) who was 31 years old when the show was filmed and was in her 6th year as junior doctor. At home, she had two young boys, whom she and her husband had moved up to Auckland, from their little East Coast hometown, sunny Tolaga Bay.
Keriana has a laugh when I ask her how Middlemore compares to the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre from The Pitt. Of course, in reality, she’s been far too busy to actually binge watch a show in the last few years.
“I honestly haven’t watched TV for so long because I’ve been so busy with exams,” she says. “I’ve never really been into medical dramas although I did kind of like House because he talks about a lot of the rare medical conditions – the weird and wonderful medical conditions that you only see once in a while.”
From what she has seen though, which show gets it closest to what it’s really like at Middlemore?
“I think they all get it right in their own way,” she says. “I think part of those shows is showing their medicine side but who they are outside of medicine and their interpersonal relationships. So, I think from that perspective you get an insight into what it’s like to be a doctor – although it’s probably a lot less dramatic than they show on there!”
For Keriana, the idea of being on TV was never something she pictured happening to her – nor was it something she ever wanted to do, even when this show was pitched to her.
“Initially I was really hesitant to be involved – I really didn’t want to be in front of the camera at all,” she says.
But then, after sitting down with the production team behind the show, she started to change her mind as she understood what they were trying to create – and she started to think about who might benefit from seeing her on the show.
“I’m Maori and I’m the first doctor in my whānau,” she says. “When I thought about the people who might watch this show, I thought about my grandparents – how they’d be the ones who would be most excited to actually sit down and watch the show and see what I do at work every day. I wanted to do this for them.”
And the reality of this job, day-to-day, is, it’s one heck of a demanding, intense job. The life of a junior doctor is often 70-hour weeks, under intense pressure. Off the clock, there’s more study to be done, with exams always lurking around the corner. Somehow, you then have to find room to live a life outside of the hospital.
Keriana says she’s able to do her job, study – and film a TV show – really because of the support of her husband.
“I didn’t put my children down for bed for months, because every night, I would be studying,” she says. “He did it. Just to have that, the freedom or the ability to do that at night, made such a difference.”
Her husband is also the one holding down the forts on the nights she is at the hospital. “Once or twice a week, we’ll do what’s called a long day,” she says. “So, it’s an 8am start until 10.30pm, and then you’ll come back the next day at 8am.” The hours are long – and, says Keriana, they’re only getting longer.
When I ask her what the key challenges facing the healthcare sector are at the moment, she doesn’t take a beat. “The key one that is notable every day is staffing,” she says. “We’re just constantly short staffed and that’s difficult. It means covering shifts, or working longer hours – and it can be really tiresome. It can test your passion – because obviously all of us come into this with a passion to provide services and look after people. But when you’re working so much, it can be difficult to hold onto that. Those are the times we lean on each other and help each other to get through.”
Diary of a Junior Doctor is on TVNZ + now.
