Why watching Casualty is bad for your health

WATCHING medical dramas can make patients more fearful when they arrive at hospital for surgery, warn doctors.

They found that regular viewers of television shows such as Casualty or Holby City are more frightened when being admitted for an operation.

They are more worried things may go seriously wrong than those who rarely or never tune in. A study said many may think the scenarios they see on screen reflect everyday life in hospital, heightening their anxiety.

Up to five million people a week watch Casualty, the BBC Saturday night drama which has been running for more than 30 years. Plots often feature complex emergency surgery in chaotic working conditions at the hard-pressed A&e unit. Holby City, a spin-off launched in 1999, portrays the fictional lives of staff and patients on the hospital’s surgical wards.

For the research, surgeons at the Minimally Invasive Centre, a hospital in Hunfeld, Germany, quizzed 162 patients arriving for routine operations.

A scoring system measured how worried they were in the days before their surgery. Participants were also asked how often they saw TV medical dramas. Roughly half had significant levels of anxiety but the fans of hospital-based fiction were the worst affected.

All of the group of 13 suffering the highest levels of anxiety were frequent viewers of medical shows. Fears were highest among the over-40s, said the report in the journal european Surgical Research.