Season 1, Episode 3
Date of release: January 24, 2025 (Netflix)
Written by: Choi Tae-kang
Directed by: Lee Do-yoon
“You have one mission in life: That is to take care of your patients. All this stuff about our department's budget, it's unimportant.”
That is why you have doctors who are interested in the administrative side of things, so that they can be bothered with the numbers, while the rest of the department's staff can focus on patient care. Every hospital needs a Dr. Kerry Weaver, and every medical drama needs that character played by Laura Innes on ER, and you will be sure that things will run a lot smoother.
The show may have turned the budget side of things into an ongoing storyline, with Dr. Baek seemingly burning money that the hospital doesn't have, even though I don't know how that could be possible. The hospital administration pays the doctors who are on shift (and the materials and medication they use), and that doesn't change when Dr. Baek and his team operate in the OR, since they are already in the hospital, working, with materials and medication that has been ordered according to the expected numbers of patient (which should not have changed when compared to previous years). Also, the hospital can be repaid for their services by patients' healthcare providers, which I guess is either a public health insurance program that Koreans pay into to be insured, or private insurers, which should make it easier for the finance department to bill the patients. So, here I am, not knowing a single lick about the South Korean health insurance business, wondering why the hospital bleeds money when Baek is operating.
The doctors outside of Baek's team are generally annoying. You only get to see them when they are in meetings with other doctors, making me wonder if any of them are actually working and following up on patient care at the moment, or if they just park their asses in their offices. Don't they have anything else to do than scheming to chase Baek out of the hospital? Han Yu-rim, the apparent antagonist of this show, is always shown angry and pissed about anything Baek does, but as the head of general surgery, he never seems to be depicted doing his job. How nice it would be if the show were to start going a little more into the other departments of the hospital, to show that actual doctors are working at this hospital, and Baek isn't running the real show all by himself from the trauma unit.
Meanwhile, this episode delivered some great sentimentality about the patients the doctors were treating. The father who died and donated his organs to his children was treated with respect after his death, and the episode took time to display the importance of organ donation. There were a few plot conveniences in the story (Baek asking for a favor that happened to be the kidney transplant that he shouldn't have known about when he was asking for that favor), but I can excuse it since the story was favorable toward organ donors, and that Baek was ready to bend the law a little and push for immediate transplant surgery. Always make sure that you promote organ donation properly and thoroughly, because it's one of the greatest things a person can do after the end of their life.
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| A moment of silence and respect for the true hero of the story. |
