07.17.2025
Heart of Safety Coalition
The Pitt and the truth about care team safety and wellbeing – Mel Herbert, MD, FACEP
07.14.2025
Episode 100 | Duration: 30:00
Welcome to our 100th Caring Greatly podcast episode!
Since 2019, Caring Greatly has been a destination where listeners can be inspired to innovate and help transform healthcare for the better. All 100 episodes have been carefully created to bring more visibility to the importance of care team safety and wellbeing, which the Heart of Safety Coalition defines as psychological and emotional safety, dignity and inclusion, and physical safety. These three pillars of care team safety are essential to advancing better healing and working environments.
Staying true to the three pillars and our key principles, we invited Mel Herbert, MD, to commemorate our 100th episode and help increase awareness about the importance of protecting the safety and wellbeing of healthcare professionals. Dr. Herbert is an ED physician, medical educator, and a consultant and writer for the ground-breaking medical drama The Pitt.
The Pitt’s human-centered stories and heart-hitting visuals are shining a spotlight on the hard truths and real challenges that care team members face hour by hour - whether it’s resource constraints, moral dilemmas, unimaginable losses or workplace violence. The show reveals the weight of responsibilities physicians, nurses and other care team members carry and the toll it can take on their psychological, emotional and physical safety. It also showcases the incredible humanity healthcare workers bring to each other and to their patients.
In addition to his work with The Pitt, Dr. Herbert is a Professor of Emergency Medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine and internationally recognized entrepreneur, pioneer, philanthropist, speaker and award-winning educator in emergency medicine. Australia-born and trained in the United States and Australia, Mel founded EM:RAP (Emergency Medicine: Reviews and Perspectives) providing quality and engaging educational content for emergency care providers over the past 20+years. Mel’s initiatives are founded on beliefs that emergency care and medical education should be accessible by all. This belief paved the way for the establishment of his non-profit initiative called EM:RAP GO, which helps bring emergency medical education to underserved communities around the globe.
Mel Herbert is a leader who cares greatly.
Related links:
- Mel Herbert’s website: Includes links to his book, Extraordinarily Average
- Medscape discussion: Behind the Scenes of The Pitt: Depicting the Hard Truths
- USA Today article: Noah Wyle: I play a doctor on 'The Pitt.' Real health care workers need our help
- The Nocturnists Podcast: Behind the Scenes of The Pitt with Gemmill, Sachs and Herbert
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Stryker. The provided resources may contain links to external websites or third-party content. We do not endorse, control or assume any responsibility for the accuracy, relevance, legality or quality of the information found on these external sites.
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