'Call the Midwife' actor Stephen McGann describes authenticity in medical TV drama
2015-04-22
(Press-News.org) Actor Stephen McGann, who plays GP Dr Patrick Turner in the hit BBC period drama Call the Midwife, has described the steps taken by the writers, production team and actors to ensure the series has sufficient medical accuracy and authenticity. In an essay published today by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, McGann writes of the unique insight that the role of Dr Turner has given him into questions regarding the way popular culture portrays medics and medicine. While working on Call the Midwife, McGann's interest in the relationship between medical science and wider society led him to complete an MSc in Science Communication at Imperial College London.
McGann explains how issues of medical accuracy on Call the Midwife are addressed from early script development stage, when series writer Heidi Thomas undertakes research using open-access journals and sources such as the Wellcome Trust archive. Series clinical advisor Terri Coates, a practising midwife and midwifery lecturer, then reviews early drafts to check facts and advise on aspects of childbirth and nursing procedure - calling in experts to address specialist medical areas. Issues with a significant social impact are tackled with additional help from relevant health charities, to ensure support for stories and offer valuable stakeholder perspectives.
On the film set, Coates oversees all aspects of accuracy and authenticity in performance. This can include the pronunciation of difficult medical phraseology, the depiction of complex obstetric procedures, and the correct use of a dizzying array of period equipment and implements.
Writing of his role as Dr Turner, McGann says: "My job is to throw a light on key human aspects of doctors' lives and experiences through the portrayal of an individual medic." He adds that judging a medical character solely by the extent to which they exemplify a class of medical professional through their procedural actions - rather than as a unique human personality within this social group - exposes interesting assumptions and subjectivities in an expert audience. Recognising that some medical professionals are uneasy about Turner being a smoker, he describes how he was inspired to make his character a smoker after reading a BMJ study which observed the effects of smoking on 34,439 male smokers over a fifty year period starting in 1951 - all of them doctors.
McGann goes on to explain how the medical accuracy and authenticity pioneered by Call the Midwife has helped disseminate valuable insights into important public health issues.
Last year the Call the Midwife production team was asked to provide technical assistance to a Bangladeshi TV company that wanted to depict authentic birth scenes in a new TV health drama. This collaboration succeeded in communicating safe maternal health practices in a conservative culture where discussion of pregnancy and childbirth is still considered taboo. Closer to home, when an episode of Call the Midwife featured a mother with diphtheria in February 2015, the NHS Choices website reported a 3,720% increase in visitors requesting information about the disease - with 30,000 visits during transmission.
McGann says: "In an age where complacency or misinformation regarding the safety and purpose of vaccination threatens the return of previously eradicated contagions, the power of dramas like Call the Midwife to raise medical awareness should not be underestimated."
INFORMATION:
Notes to editors
From how to who: accuracy and authenticity in the portrayal of the medic in TV drama (DOI: 10.1177/0141076815579584) by Stephen McGann will be published by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine at 00:05hrs (UK time) on Wednesday 22 April 2015.
For further information or a copy of the paper please contact:
Rosalind Dewar
Media Office, Royal Society of Medicine
DL +44 (0) 1580 764713
M +44 (0) 7785 182732
media@rsm.ac.uk
The JRSM is the flagship journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and is published by SAGE. It has full editorial independence from the RSM. It has been published continuously since 1809. Its Editor is Dr Kamran Abbasi.
SAGE is a leading international publisher of journals, books, and electronic media for academic, educational, and professional markets. Since 1965, SAGE has helped inform and educate a global community of scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students spanning a wide range of subject areas including business, humanities, social sciences, and science, technology, and medicine. An independent company, SAGE has principal offices in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC. http://www.sagepublications.com
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2015-04-22
The widely held belief that depression is due to low levels of serotonin in the brain - and that effective treatments raise these levels - is a myth, argues a leading psychiatrist in The BMJ this week.
David Healy, Professor of Psychiatry at the Hergest psychiatric unit in North Wales, points to a misconception that lowered serotonin levels in depression are an established fact, which he describes as "the marketing of a myth."
The serotonin reuptake inhibiting (SSRI) group of drugs came on stream in the late 1980s, nearly two decades after first being mooted, writes ...
2015-04-22
The UK government plan to fund and to increase participation in rugby in schools has not been informed by injury data, warn experts in The BMJ this week.
Professor Allyson Pollock and colleagues at Queen Mary University of London say the government "should ensure the safety and effectiveness of (school) sports" and call for injury surveillance and prevention programmes to be established to help reduce injury rates.
The high rates of injury in rugby union and rugby league for professional and amateur players, including children, are well established and a cause for medical ...
2015-04-22
As the deadline for the millennium development goals approaches, experts writing in The BMJ this week take stock of the successes, failures, and oversights, and look ahead to the next phase - the sustainable development goals.
The millennium development goals are eight aspirational targets set by the United Nations (UN) in New York in September 2000, explain Dr Mark Beattie and colleagues.
The progress made towards some of the goals has been remarkable, they write. For example, child mortality has effectively halved worldwide, from 90 per 1,000 births in 1990 to 46 ...
2015-04-22
WASHINGTON -- Law should be viewed as a major determinant of health and safety and can be utilized as a powerful and innovative tool to address pressing global health concerns, says a newly formed, high-level commission announced today by the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University in partnership with The Lancet.
In their "Comment" published online in The Lancet, the Commission's co-chairs Lawrence O. Gostin and John T. Monahan, along with the Commission's project coordinator, Mary C. DeBartolo, and Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief ...
2015-04-22
Alcohol and drug misuse are responsible for around a third of all deaths in former male prisoners and half in female ex-prisoners, a new study of almost 48000 ex-prisoners published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal has found. Moreover, the research shows that a substantial proportion of these deaths are from preventable causes, including accidents and suicide (42% in men and 70% in women).
Several studies have reported high death rates after release from prison, but few have looked at potential risk factors for these high rates. Led by Seena Fazel, Professor of Forensic ...
2015-04-22
The good relationship between humans and dogs was certainly influenced by domestication. For long, it was assumed that humans preferred particularly tolerant animals for breeding. Thus, cooperative and less aggressive dogs could develop. Recently, however, it was suggested that these qualities were not only specific for human-dog interactions, but characterize also dog-dog interactions. Friederike Range and Zsófia Virányi from the Messerli Research Institute investigated in their study if dogs are in fact less aggressive and more tolerant towards their conspecifics ...
2015-04-22
A team of French clinicians has diagnosed the first case of rabies in that country since 2003. Only 20 cases of human rabies had been diagnosed in France between 1970 and 2003. Moreover, the patient was unaware of having been bitten. So it is not surprising that that diagnosis was not suggested until day 12 post admission to the intensive care unit. The case report appeared April 8 in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology.
"Rabies is nowadays extremely rare in the developed world," said Christian Brun-Buisson, head ...
2015-04-21
DALLAS, April 21, 2014 -- Among black heart failure patients, moderate depression may increase the risk of heart failure patients being hospitalized or dying, according to research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Heart Failure.
Comparing outcomes of 747 blacks to 1,420 whites with heart failure using a patient-reported scale of depressive symptoms, researchers found:
Even moderate depressive symptoms may raise the risk of black heart failure patients being hospitalized or dying.
Blacks with levels of depressive symptoms even below the levels ...
2015-04-21
(MEMPHIS, Tenn. - April 21, 2015) Researchers have identified a protein that offers a new focus for developing targeted therapies to tame the severe inflammation associated with multiple sclerosis (MS), colitis and other autoimmune disorders. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists led the study which appears today in the scientific journal Immunity.
Investigators showed that the protein NLRP12 works in T cells to limit production of chemical messengers or cytokines that fuel inflammation. T cells are specialized white blood cells produced to eliminate specific ...
2015-04-21
The Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has released an updated proposal that will establish an international quality standard for photovoltaic (PV) module manufacturing. The document is intended for immediate use by PV manufacturers when producing modules on an industrial scale so they can increase investor, utility, and consumer confidence in PV system performance.
"Our recent research on 50,000 systems found that, during the time period we studied, just 0.1% of all PV systems were affected by damaged or underperforming modules and less than ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] 'Call the Midwife' actor Stephen McGann describes authenticity in medical TV drama
