It started with the Fox medical drama, The Resident. And it has now become a veritable deluge with other medical series joining in. Amidst the Coronavirus shutdown and all TV shows going into forced hiatus, medical dramas have donated all the available medical supplies on their sets and in their storage to real hospitals in their vicinities.
The creators of the medical series The Resident, were the first to be galvanised into action when it was brought to their notice that with a rising number of Coronavirus patients to tend to, major hospitals in the country were running short of supplies. Showrunner Amy Holden Jones realised that they had an excess of medical supplies on set.
Along with co-creators Hayley Schore and Dr. Roshan Sethi, she organised efforts, collected all the stuff and drove down to the Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. The trio donated two trunks full of masks, caps, gloves, gowns, shoe covers, scrubs, hair covers, lab coats and isolation gowns, among other items to the hospital.
Taking cue from The Resident, several other TV medical shows swung into action, rounded up all their usable medical stuff, and donated them to hospitals nearby for actual use. The people at Grey’s Anatomy donated hospital gowns, surgery gowns, gloves and loads of other stuff to local LA hospitals. Its spin-off show, Station 19, donated around 300 of the much-sought-after N95 masks to their local fire-station, and more to two other fire stations.
Likewise, ‘New Amsterdam’ donated all its supplies to the Bellevue Hospital in NYC, while Vancouver-based show ‘The Good Doctor’ donated its medical stock to their local Canadian authorities.
As the executive producer of one of the shows said, with production shut down on all TV shows and movies, it was the very least they could do to help health workers who are risking their own health and lives to tend to those infected with the virus, and to control its rapid spread.
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