The new Max medical drama The Pitt follows doctors, nurses, residents and more in an emergency room at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital. Each episode contains new and returning patients and possibly some of the bloodiest scenes since The Red Wedding in Game of Thrones. But how realistic are the showrunners with their portrayal of the issues hospital employees encounter in The Pitt?

How Realistic Is ‘The Pitt’?

More than one doctor has weighed in on the procedures seen in The Pitt season 1. Dr. Lukas Ramcharran, as an attending physician and assistant professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins, was asked if the show was “the most realistic depiction of emergency medicine on television, perhaps ever.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Ramcharran told Vulture in an article published on March 21, 2025. “I really like the format. The idea of one shift is good at showing what a day in the life is like and different push-and-pulls in the role.”

He continued, “You have the medicine, but you also have all these other non-medicine things that pull at your attention: your team members, your hospital, the trials and tribulations of working with people who come to you on their worst day.”

Ramcharran also added that The Pitt focuses on less of the dramatic storylines of personal lives between doctors, which he explained that there was “no time for” when it came to working in an emergency room.

“There’s a lot more computer work. There’s a lot more phone calls. There’s a lot more interruptions, right? All of that is very accurate,” Ramcharran noted.

An Anesthesiology Resident Said She Was ‘Pleasantly Surprised’ by ‘The Pitt’

Dr. Tricia Pendergrast, an anesthesiology resident, also spoke about the accuracies seen in The Pitt in a TikTok video, including doctors and residents chugging energy drinks, patients getting angry and crowded waiting rooms.

“There are very real things, like doctors not taking care of themselves and throwing up in the bathroom and going back to work, or the fact that Doctor Robbie clearly has PTSD from COVID,” Pendergrast said in the clip she posted on January 11, 2025. “The main characters in the show actually spend a good amount of time handling social issues.”

An ER nurse who goes by Tez on TikTok posted a video and admitted that she and her husband, who works as a paramedic, had a “long standing rule in their house where they don’t watch medical shows.”

“We’re hypercritical, we know what actually happens, nobody’s ready to go, always at the bedside for a code, you don’t always have the biggest room, etc. The list goes on, except for The Pitt,” Tez told her followers on January 24, 2025. “I’m here in solidarity to say if you are a nursing student, if you are currently in nursing school and are considering emergency medicine or critical care, if you’re pre-nursing, if you’re a Certified Nursing Assistant, [watch] The Pitt.”

The Pitt’s Fiona Dourif Attested to the Series’ Accuracy

Fiona Dourif, who plays Dr. Cassie McKay, also discussed how important it was for The Pitt’s creators to include honest portrayals of what would happen in an emergency room. The actress said that executive producer Joe Sachs oversaw the medical accuracy written in the scripts.

“He made sure that everything was really medically accurate in a way that I’m getting a lot of feedback from medical professionals and also all of our consultants,” Fiona explained to People in an article published on April 10, 2025. “And every fourth person in that hospital was a medical professional. So there was a lot of attention paid to accuracy in a way that is really cool to be a part of.”