The Critical Hour is a medical reality TV show about real medical emergencies. Similar in format to the TV show COPS, it is shown in the United States by the Discovery Communications's Discovery Health Channel network.
The name "Critical Hour" refers to the fact that in many cases, such as heart attacks, automobile accidents, diabetic comas, overdoses, and other emergencies, medical care for patients during the first hour after the emergency plays a critical role in the patient's outcome, because survival rate for a trauma patient goes down significantly if initial care is not given within the first hour. For this reason, the initial 60 minutes following a traumatic incident is often called the critical hour in emergency medicine parlance. It is more commonly known as the "Golden Hour Concept".
The show first aired in 2003. Early episodes of the series took place in Columbus, Ohio (Grant Medical Center), New Orleans, Louisiana (Charity Hospital), and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (Oklahoma University Medical Center), among other places. A new set of episodes was shot in 2004 and 2005, centered around two cities and three trauma centers: Baltimore, Maryland (University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center) and Toronto, Ontario, Canada (Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre; Toronto St. Michael's Hospital). The former shows were a decidedly different format, with a running timeclock on the patients as they made their way through the initial entrance into the trauma system (and then updates to their progress as the episode went on), while the latter episodes tend to transition between patients' stories, following a smaller set of patient stories from beginning to end throughout the episode. A standalone show, Chopper Rescue, a documentary about flight paramedics in Los Angeles, California, was added to the rotation under the "Critical Hour" umbrella title in 2005. Production continued on the show in 2006, this time centered exclusively on the two Toronto-area hospitals, though the Baltimore Shock Trauma episodes continue to air in reruns periodically.
Like most traumatic injuries in real life, most stories featured on the show end in a "save", but some do not, clearly demonstrating that as remarkable as Trauma Medicine is today, it still can't save everyone from everything.
Famous quotes containing the words critical hour, critical and/or hour:
“To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts—especially texts by black women. A working-class Jewish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American scholar and educator. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B2 (July 27, 1994)
“And not an hour ago you hadn’t a penny to warm your pocket. Did someone die and leave you a pot of gold?”
—Dudley Nichols (1895–1960)