Refusiosa: A Mad Max Saga – why going to work feels like going to war

Witness Me

The recently released Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), directed by George Miller, builds on the 2015 blockbuster Mad Max: Fury Road. Both films explore a post-nuclear desert world, where an underclass is beholden to an overlord who meters out water – now the most precious resource – in cruelly small quantities to assert his control. In Furiosa, the titular character leads a war against rival kingdoms of the Bullet Farm and Gas Town, each their own totalitarian dystopias populated by beleaguered proles.

If you’ve visited or worked in an Emergency Department recently, the same thought may have crossed your mind as it routinely does mine: ‘It’s like Mad Max in here’. Moreover, interactions with colleagues from different departments within the hospital might have felt like you were being forced to go to war with the registrar from Bullet Farm (orthopaedics) or Gas Town (gastroenterology). The constant back-and-forth drama of referring a patient for admission under a specialty service that f…