The Pitt, a medical drama that just finished its second season, has become a cultural sensation. Set in a Pittsburgh emergency room, each season unfolds through a single shift, with each episode representing a real-time hour in the ER.
I think one reason why The Pitt has resonated is that it captures the systemic complexities and human stories – inspiring and grim – that converge in hospitals. It may be set in Pittsburgh, but the core tensions are found in many places.
The show relates to some of the core insights of our latest research. First, that trust is foundational to how people experience and navigate healthcare. And second, that trust is built on slivers of personal experience – not on a wide view of system quality or overall outcomes.
Waiting Rooms and Wanting Trust in Canadian Healthcare
The Pitt’s healthcare providers are depicted as caring and capable people in a system run ragged. We see brilliant doctors save lives and show deep sensitivity in the face of vulnerability. We also see a standing-room-only waiting room filled with discomfort, frustration, and fear. We see what it feels like to need help: not great.
In Canada, as in The Pitt, our research finds that needing help doesn’t feel great. In Environics’ 2026 healthcare trust report, 60% of Canadians say the healthcare system is either deteriorating or in crisis. Delay is a key factor behind these attitudes: more than one in four say that faster access and speed would do the most to increase their trust.
When trust is low, behaviour changes among the general public: 12.2% say they have avoided seeking healthcare, 14.7% waited until their condition got worse, 25.2% self-treated or managed on their own, and 12.8% went to the emergency room instead of seeking primary care.
The last finding may shed light on data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, which reports that emergency visits in Canada increased by about 600,000 from April 2024 to March 2025 (from 15.5 million to 16.1 million).
Violence and Anger
These workarounds and last resorts are signs of a strained system. Another sign of strain are the posters in Canadian clinical settings articulating a zero-tolerance policy for verbal and physical abuse of care providers and staff.
The dangers care providers face from angry patients is a recurring feature of The Pitt. Clinicians on The Pitt also get angry – not only at patients who assault their colleagues but also at insurance providers, hospital bureaucracy, and a society that funnels every social problem, from poverty to loneliness, to the hospital’s doors.
In short, when a system is under strain, everyone feels it. Another reason The Pitt lands is that it reminds viewers that physicians, nurses, and care teams are people, too. They’re not simply representatives of the system; they live inside it and suffer from its failures. We see competent people doing their best in an environment shaped by triage, urgency, emotional strain, workplace politics, bureaucracy, staffing shortages, and the constant demand to keep going for the next patient. The pressure is relentless.
Administration
One source of pressure in The Pitt is patient charting: doctors struggle to find time to document between cases; they get behind and stay late to catch up. Charting is a quiet but persistent symbol of clinician overload, tying administrative pressure to exhaustion, frustration, and the risk of errors.
Here too, the fiction reflects reality. The Canadian Medical Association says physicians spend 19.8 million hours annually on unnecessary administrative tasks, and 82% of physicians say that administrative workload is an impediment to caring for patients, taking too much time and attention and thus impinging on patient care and human connection.
Access and Connection
A lack of time and connection is a problem both for doctors, who want to help people, and for patients. People do not experience healthcare only through clinical outcomes. They experience it through the path to care, which can build or erode trust. In our research:
Trust breaks down not only when care fails, but when care feels hard to reach, hard to understand, or hard to move through.
That navigation burden also helps explain why some are taking more of their health into their own hands. Sometimes this choice to take control looks proactive and even positive: researching symptoms and prevention strategies, tracking biomarkers, or experimenting with wellness routines. But sometimes these behaviours are a workaround born of necessity, not empowerment. When access is delayed or unclear, people improvise.
Information
Even when they don’t seek care directly, people still look for information they can trust. Our research shows that clinicians remain the most trusted sources of health information in Canada:
When it comes to health information, Canadians are much less likely to trust social media platforms (17%), health influencers (15%), and online communities (21%). About a quarter of Canadians (27%) express at least some trust in AI tools for health information.
If health systems and clinicians want to make use of tools like AI (which may help to reduce administrative burden and improve access, if implemented thoughtfully), they should remember that trust in technology can’t be assumed. It must be built with clarity, oversight, transparency, and performance. The biggest AI booster in The Pitt – a new character introduced in Season Two – is also a stickler for human oversight of the tool; that’s an early signal to the audience that she can be trusted.
Equity
Equity also belongs at the centre of this conversation. Trust in health systems is uneven because experiences of care are uneven. Racialized Canadians are more likely than white Canadians to rely on walk-in clinics, more likely to give up on seeking care, and more likely to place trust in AI tools, online communities, social media and health influencers for health information. These are important signals that access pathways, information ecosystems, and lived experiences of care are not the same for everyone.
The Pitt creates a world dense with people, constraints, judgments, delays, and uneven outcomes. As viewers, we have a wide view on all the demands ER staff are navigating – but we also sympathize with patients who ask what’s taking so long, and who wonder if this hospital really knows what it’s doing.
In the show as in life, trust is built or lost in moments of personal experience: whether someone feels heard, whether they understand what happens next, whether they can get care without extraordinary persistence, whether the system feels fair, and whether the care provider has the capacity to treat them like a person.
According to our research, rebuilding Canadians’ trust in their health systems will require faster and more reliable access; reducing friction in navigation; protecting time for care by reducing unnecessary administrative burden. And it will require recognizing that a more patient-centric system is not simply more efficient, it’s better able to perform its most essential function: connecting people who need care with people capable of providing that care – people who, indeed, have made care their life’s work.
