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First off, everything about this drama was great, cinematography, story line, cast, acting, everything. You have well-known actors like Ueno, Naohito and Kento and this drama is based from the well-received Korean drama with the same title. What more can you ask for?

It focuses on Shindo Minato, an aspiring Pediatrician with autism and savant syndrome. As you would expect, society isn’t very friendly to people with autism. This drama features his continuous struggle as he pursues his dream, despite what society tells him. What is impressive about him is that his dream is more focused on HELPING children. Not really on BECOMING a pediatrician. As most people would focus on becoming what they want to be when they grow up, Shindo directs his dream towards helping the people concerned (kids, in his case) and sees it as his purpose. Reason for his drive is due to his horrible past but I won’t delve into that.

Let’s stray a little. This post will focus more on the politics inside the hospital which was so obvious that I can’ even ignore it. (You might want to watch Black Pean, too, read my review below. Black Pean is a lot more political than this one)

So here’s the situation. The hospital is having financial problems. Investors backing out due to declining profits and expenses blowing up. Reports point to Pediatrics Division as the main reason why this is happening. So naturally, they plan to close it and invest more on other divisions that earn them more money. The employees under Pediatrics would be transferred to other departments eventually but what’s of more concern here are the patients and their families who rely on these pediatricians. Who will now take care of their children? Apparently, there aren’t much pediatrics divisions in other hospitals in the area (this is shown in episode 3 where a child died due to various local hospitals declining the ambulance’s request to take her in despite the quick attention from the ambulance team, she was just inside the van, writhing in pain, as the ambulance team contacts nearby hospitals and waits for them to accept this child. They waited for four hours before the ambulance team’s request got to Togo Hospital). If Togo’s Pediatrics closes, where will they bring their children? What will happen to them?

Closing the Pediatrics division is portrayed as a heartless move here because of how the drama focuses on patient relationships and how saving kids’ lives are dramatized so much (But isn’t that true anyway? I mean, saving a life is a noble act, you don’t even have to dramatize it) that you’ll just close the division because it’s not earning. Meaning, you don’t really care about the patients, you just care about the profits enough to just throw the kids away. (Don’t know much about reality though, when this happens, do hospitals take the initiative to book patients in other hospitals to compensate for this move?)

What’s incredible about this is how it mirrors reality. This is exactly how corporations work. Only this time, it’s a hospital with REAL stakeholders, LIVES IN DANGER, kids who need medical attention. In corporations, you stop selling products that don’t earn you money, or you improve it so people will like it better. What do the products do to people? Great experience, easier way of doing things, better way of living. That’s great! But in a hospital? In some cases, unattended kids might just die because of an emergency, a sudden rupture in a few organs, hemorrhages, etc. How could you let kids go unattended? Even if it’s just a small percentage of the hospital’s entire patient population, every life matters.