In the brand new season of Hospital: Deepthree new high-profile Australians step into the forefront where the stakes are high, and empathy matters. The returning series broadens its lens to explore a wider range of departments than ever before at not one, but two of the country’s busiest and best-known hospitals.
Award-winning food journalist, best-selling cookbook author, radio host and international television personality Matt Preston, former professional tennis player, broadcaster and public speaker Jelena Dokic, and Hollywood actress, producer and activist Ruby Rose, all came with deep personal connections to the public health system, but nothing prepared them for the emotional and eye-opening experience that lay ahead.
Every episode gives us a glimpse of the courage, compassion and, above all, the strength of those who work tirelessly on the front lines of our hospitals.
SBS spoke to Preston about his memorable, challenging and often difficult experience on the front line, and the life-changing lessons he learned from his time at the end.
Going from the world of food to the world of medicine seems like quite a leap. How did you feel when you entered the hospital on the first day, and what did you hope to learn from the experience?
I think hospitals are a part of all our lives. We connect with them in times of fear, and in times of joy.
For me, there are some things I wanted to learn about being a part of this trip. But of course, the first day was full of panic because you are going to a place where you don’t know anything about what is going on behind the scenes. It can be like walking into the back of a restaurant for the first time, but hospitals are more complicated than any restaurant.
What have you learned from being in a situation where bells ring and one person’s actions can mean life or death for a patient?
Get out of the way. Get out of the way. They have this.
That’s a hospital issue. In a place like geriatrics, most of the day is down, but then it turns into life and death times, and everyone jumps, including the patients sometimes, which you don’t want. There’s an incredible amount of risk in hospitals, so you want to try and minimize that.
And in those chaotic situations, what have you learned about the people beside you who are frontline workers?
I think the fact that you can go from second to sixth gear in a second. When that blue code goes off, you really don’t know what you’re running into. Everyone handles a different device.
It could be something simple, but it could be a moment of exhaustion or all those other things that could happen. So you don’t want to be in a situation where you go, oh, I actually need something that I don’t have. And then you have all the problems with the patient’s Resus (resuscitation), Non-Resus (non-resuscitation) claims. There is a whole range of complications.
There are very few jobs outside of the medical field where you deal with life and death every day.
In this thread, he also noted that there were very few professions where abuse was as common as the medical field.
Things can get horribly wrong when it comes to life and death in many fields, but I’ve been asking people, can you think of another place where abuse is the norm? Because patients with dementia do not behave like a dear, sweet grandmother or a grandfather who misses them. Dementia changes them, it can change them a lot.
You know, that disturbing behavior is a big, big deal. It’s a daily opportunity. It’s really hard to tell where you should go. It’s surreal.
I think one of the things we all agree on is that everyone should work in a safe workplace. And if it’s not safe, then it’s visible to those people who own it, you know, to make it safe. I think that is a question we are still struggling with in the public hospital system.
And I don’t know what the solution is, but it’s a challenge. It is also a big challenge when the elderly patients end up not in the ward for the elderly. We have people trained in pediatrics, but sometimes a patient will end up in the operating room because there is no room in the pediatric room and they come in through the ED. How do you deal with that patient having some form of dementia? How do you deal with that behavior in a situation where they live in a ward with other patients, non-child patients, and nurses who may not have specific experience working in that area?
Our public hospital system is priceless, but we need to protect it and maintain it and take care of it, as you would anything of such great value.
If you look at dementia rates, those numbers are starting to rise. And we haven’t doubled the number of beds for the elderly. We still haven’t answered the question of where they will go after the hospital. We have not doubled the number of elderly households.
I think keeping people in their homes is good. That’s what happened to my mother, which was amazing. It was way, way better. You are safe in your home, you are in danger of falling a little. And when you’re older you want a combination of security and dignity. And that is sometimes easy to bring home. Again, you are in your place. You can always look out the window and wave at your passing neighbor, and feel connected. I think when you are admitted to the hospital, it can feel very far away.
We saw in the first episode how this can be beneficial, when you visit home to see Val, and he is sitting in his garden, looking at it.
He said everything is the same as if you look in the elderly room, there are no bright colors on the wall because they don’t want to overfeed the patients. It may sound very cold, it’s an institution.
You know, when you walk into his house there’s a Herald Sun front page picture of Val running for a seat in a Collingwood grand final as a kid. There are all these things that connect you to who you are and your memory and that it’s fun to share. It is very important.
From your experience at the hospital, what qualities did you like about these people who kept the whole system running?
I think if they were spoiled rats like me, they would all go!
They’ll all be going: “That’s too hard. This is too hard.”
But they feel a real connection with their patients. They sincerely feel that the work they do is really important. If they don’t, it’s not done. And that would be a disaster.
These people will be taking care of your mother, your grandmother, your lover, for you for years to come. So we should be respecting them now. These are the people who bring dignity to many people in their old age. They play a very important role, and what they do is amazing. I don’t think I have the strength to do that. I respect them a lot because they do.
There was kind of a post-COVID thing about what these people were heroes, and then we didn’t fund them and we didn’t look after them better. We did not support them.
And it’s usually not money. It may just be that many workers. Perhaps it is the high number of nurses, including nurses of a certain level of experience.
In the series, Jelena and Ruby travel on their own. What did you learn from their experiences, and how did their personal journey compare to yours?
Ruby and I hugged a few times and talked about it. I think it was really exciting to go on the same journey and see how many people had a positive impact on patients.
In the neurology area that I’ve spent some time in, they’re already in a place where they’re hoping that surgery will change something they’re living with. And that has a big impact on their health, and surgery may make them better.
In Ruby’s case, it was much the same. So I think that whole thing of watching and seeing the inspiring nature of how things can go from the worst to the best. I mean, it’s amazing. I think that was one of the things that struck a chord between my experience and Ruby’s.
The human body is amazing, how quickly it can repair itself, how it can re-direct neural pathways
Surgeons can just remove things, and I go, what is that? Oh, a tiny brain the size of an oyster is pressed out of the cranium. Oh, a small piece of brain! And then the next day to go in and see that patient and talk to them about the truth, it’s kind of amazing. It’s like, yesterday I looked inside your head! I saw your brain jumping around. Those surgeons, they make it look so easy.
It’s amazing to go from being completely paralyzed due to the threat of epilepsy to now not having that because of surgery, or being able to drive again, despite not being able to drive for 15 years because you had a seizure.
What do you hope the audience will take away from the second season of the series?
That our public hospital system is priceless, but we need to protect it and take care of it and take care of it, as you would anything of such great value.
I think maybe that’s what it is. The danger is that you ignore it, and it will diminish. And sometimes, you lose good people, because they don’t want to do the work anymore. That is a real problem. If people start deciding that it’s not worth their time, then you have a real problem with the health system. And there is no doubt that the dedicated nursing staff in the ward, who are part of the list of that ward, are the lifeblood of this program.
Hospital: Deep premieres Thursday 5 March at 8:30pm on SBS, the first episode is streaming now on SBS On Demand.
The first season of Hospital: Deep starring Melissa Leong, Costa Georgiadis and Samuel Johnson is available to stream for free on SBS On Demand.
Hospital: Deep
