Podcast / Episode 42 · 38 min · 9 September 2026
The Night Shift: staying steady with an ER chief.
Dr. Lena Brooks on triage thinking — how casualty teams reach crisp calls from messy information, and what the rest of us can steal for Monday mornings.
What you’ll hear
An emergency department at 2 a.m. is decision-making with the difficulty turned all the way up: incomplete data, ticking clocks, lives attached. Lena Brooks has run one for eleven years, and she argues the ER’s methods transfer cleanly to offices that merely feel like casualties.
The conversation reconstructs a single brutal shift — a multi-casualty intake with three trainees on rotation — minute by minute: what Brooks noticed first, what she deliberately ignored, and the triage script she teaches every new registrar in week one.
Marcus links each move to the research: why narrowing options beats widening them under load, how pre-agreed roles quiet a noisy room, and what a Monday standup can borrow from a resus bay.
Worth keeping
Lines from the episode
“In triage you never decide everything. You decide the next thing, then you decide again.”Dr. Lena BrooksEmergency Department Chief
“Calm in my department isn’t a personality trait. It’s a rota, a script, and a room layout.”Dr. Lena BrooksEmergency Department Chief
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