‘Do No Harm’ Is More Than a Movie About a Nurse Who Makes a Mistake

I went into the Houston premiere of Do No Harm as a nurse. And if I’m being completely transparent, I liked it on the first take, but I questioned the medical decisions. I picked apart the medication error. I found myself frustrated with Sam Yeong, the home health nurse played by Harry Shum Jr., because I kept thinking about all the moments when he should have stopped. Asked for help. Set a boundary. Sent a patient to the emergency department. Admitted that something was beyond what he could safely manage.

Then I watched the film a second time. And I saw something different.

I stopped watching Sam as a nurse who kept making the wrong decisions and started watching him as a person who had built his entire identity around being the one who could handle everything.

That hit much closer to home.

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One of the themes that quietly follows Sam throughout Do No Harm is the idea that someone needs him because there is no one else. We see it in his relationship with his brother. Sam helped because his brother needed him. There was no one else.

Then we watch that same pattern repeat itself with his patients.

Someone needs something, and Sam handles it. A patient has concerning wounds. Sam takes responsibility. A frightened mother calls about her son’s symptoms. Sam takes responsibility again. His workload grows. He keeps going. His supervisor even compares him to Mother Teresa.

For someone whose identity is already wrapped up in being needed, praise like that doesn’t necessarily make him slow down. It reinforces the behavior.

I understand that part of Sam. I like being the person who can handle everything. I like getting things done. I like knowing that when something needs to happen, I can figure out how to make it happen. I also spent years learning one of the most important lessons of my nursing career:

There is someone else.

There has to be.

Another nurse will come in. Another shift will begin. Someone else can take the assignment. Someone else can answer the phone. Healthcare cannot depend on one individual sacrificing themselves indefinitely to keep it functioning.

And nurses need to hear this: Your hospital does not need you more than you need yourself.

That isn’t cynicism. It’s a boundary. Somewhere along the way, healthcare allowed nursing to become intertwined with sacrifice. Staying late means you’re dedicated. Taking another patient means you’re a team player. Skipping your break means patients came first. Handling everything yourself means you’re strong.

Eventually, being needed can start feeling like being valuable. Those are not the same thing.

There is one area where I don’t want compassion for Sam to become an excuse for his behavior. Sam makes a serious medication error involving vancomycin. He realizes it. And he doesn’t immediately tell anyone. As a nurse, I cannot defend that decision.

Nurses are human. Medication errors happen. What matters enormously is what happens next. Sam should have come forward the second he realized what he had done. Could his patient’s outcome have been different if he had? We don’t know. And I don’t think it’s responsible to pretend that we do. But she deserved the chance.

Immediate disclosure would have allowed the healthcare team to know exactly what had happened, assess the patient, monitor for toxicity and determine what interventions were appropriate. Sam’s fear took that opportunity away from her.

Yet this is also where filmmaker Chris Hartwell made a choice I came to appreciate. He let Sam make the wrong decision.

Hartwell’s film was heavily influenced by healthcare stories from his father, a retired family physician, and his wife, a home health nurse. Press materials we were given at the premiere said he wanted the film to hold two truths simultaneously: patient safety matters enormously, and the healthcare professionals responsible for that safety remain human beings capable of exhaustion, fear and burnout.

Instead of giving us the sanitized version of a medication error (the nurse catches it, reports it, everyone follows policy and the movie moves on), Hartwell lets us watch a nurse panic. No real patient is harmed by allowing Sam to make that terrible choice on screen.

Instead, thousands of nurses can watch him make it and ask themselves:

What would I do?

And perhaps more importantly:

Would I feel safe enough to tell the truth?

Accountability and a Culture of Fear Can Both Exist

Sam is responsible for concealing his mistake.

Full stop.

But acknowledging his responsibility doesn’t mean we should ignore the environment surrounding him.

The film depicts a workplace where mistakes appear to carry enormous professional consequences and where Sam is terrified of becoming the next person pushed out.

That matters.

A nurse should report an error because protecting the patient has to come before protecting our pride, our reputation or even our job. But healthcare organizations should also be asking why an employee might be so terrified of admitting an error that hiding it feels safer than reporting it.

Those two ideas are not contradictory.

Nurses need accountability. Nurses also need psychologically safe workplaces. If we want clinicians to report mistakes, near misses and unsafe conditions, we cannot simultaneously build cultures in which every admission of human fallibility feels like professional suicide.

Hartwell said that his own difficulty asking for help influenced the film. While writing it, he struggled with wanting to appear steady and unafraid even when he was struggling. His hope is that Sam’s story encourages people to speak before reaching a breaking point, and that workplaces become places where saying “I need help” is safe.

That message extends far beyond nursing. Everyone should be allowed to say:

I don’t know.

I made a mistake.

I can’t safely do this alone.

I need help.

Those sentences shouldn’t represent weakness. Sometimes they are the safest words a healthcare professional can say.

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We use the word burnout constantly in healthcare. I think we’ve used it so much that we’ve started applying it to almost every form of distress experienced by healthcare workers. But what happens to Sam is more complicated than simply being tired of his job. The system keeps closing in. His patients need more. His workplace expects more. His personal life needs more. His identity tells him he should be capable of giving more. And eventually there isn’t enough Sam left to meet all of those expectations. That’s where the conversation about moral injury becomes important.

Burnout describes depletion and exhaustion. The World Health Organization defines it as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. But watch Sam closely and the word never quite fits. He hasn’t lost his passion for helping. He still wants to be there. Moral injury is the better name for what’s happening to him. The term, brought into healthcare from research on combat veterans, describes the anguish that can occur when healthcare professionals find themselves participating in, witnessing or unable to prevent things that conflict with deeply held moral beliefs. Sam isn’t burned out. He’s been burned by the system around him.

Sam wants to help people. That’s the tragedy.

The quality that initially makes him such a dedicated nurse becomes entangled with his inability to establish boundaries, admit vulnerability and accept that some things are not his responsibility.

Hartwell describes empathy, responsibility and the desire to help as qualities that can make someone an exceptional nurse while also making mistakes extraordinarily difficult to carry. That distinction matters because we cannot “yoga, resilience-training or self-care” our way out of every structural problem in healthcare.

Sometimes the worker isn’t the thing that needs fixing.

There was one line in Do No Harm that stopped me cold. Sam, on the phone with his boss, his frustration boiling over:

“Patient satisfaction directly affects the bottom line and you can’t keep nurses.”

That may have been my favorite moment in the entire film. Because there it is.

It’s the contradiction nursing has been living inside for years. Healthcare has become extraordinarily sophisticated at measuring patients. Patient satisfaction. Patient outcomes. Patient access. Patient experience. Readmissions. Wait times. Quality metrics. We collect data because what we measure becomes visible, and what becomes visible can influence funding, accountability and decision-making.

But where is the equivalent urgency around the workforce?

Where are the universally visible metrics for unsafe staffing?

Workplace violence?

Missed breaks?

Moral injury?

Unsafe assignments?

Nurse turnover?

Near misses?

The conditions nurses repeatedly report before they finally decide to leave?

We cannot continue obsessing over the patient experience while treating the workforce experience as a secondary operational problem.

They are the same conversation.

The workforce is the infrastructure through which patient care happens. And right now, that infrastructure is showing cracks.

Nurses make up an enormous portion of the healthcare workforce. If we continue asking them to absorb staffing shortages, violence, emotional trauma, unrealistic expectations and increasing workloads while measuring almost everything except what those conditions are doing to them, eventually something gives; and it will give.

We should not wait until that “something” is the nurse.

When I say nurses need to do better, I don’t mean work harder.

Please don’t.

I mean we need to become better at protecting ourselves.

Ask for help.

Set the boundary.

Take the break.

Say the assignment is unsafe.

Tell someone when you are struggling.

Seek mental health support before you’re in crisis.

Stop assuming that because you can carry something, you should.

And when something is outside your responsibility, allow it to be outside your responsibility.

One of the hardest lessons for those of us who like being the person everyone can depend on is realizing that the world continues when we step away. Without spoiling the ending, Do No Harm eventually makes that point in a way I found incredibly important. The system finds someone else. It always does. Maybe that realization shouldn’t make nurses feel disposable. Maybe it should set us free.

Attending the Houston premiere was personally meaningful to me.

My advocacy work over the past several years has centered on saying things about nursing that aren’t always comfortable to say out loud. Being invited into a space created specifically to examine the emotional realities of healthcare workers felt like evidence that these conversations are gaining ground.

It made me want to work harder.

It made me want to speak louder.

And it reminded me why I continue doing this work.

Hartwell said he spent eight years bringing Do No Harm to the screen, eventually assembling a cast that includes Harry Shum Jr., Rosaline Elbay, Ronny Chieng and Jimmy Gonzales. The film opened the 2025 Dances With Films festival in Los Angeles before its wider rollout. The inspiration, however, came from much closer to home. Hartwell says years of hearing stories from his physician father and home-health-nurse wife showed him not only the extraordinary work healthcare professionals perform, but the human beings underneath it: the people who get tired, scared, and carry their work home.

I think he succeeded in showing us that humanity.

I didn’t agree with every decision Sam made, but I don’t think I was supposed to.

By my second viewing, I respected the film more because I stopped asking whether Sam represented the perfect nurse and started asking why I expected him to.

Nurses aren’t perfect.

We’re not martyrs.

We’re not Mother Teresa.

We’re people.

And sometimes doing no harm begins with recognizing when continuing to carry everything ourselves is becoming harmful, to our patients and to us.

So see the movie when you can. Do No Harm is still making its way through premieres and special screenings and doesn’t yet have a wide release date; watch the film’s site for screening and release announcements.

Then ask yourself the question Sam waits far too long to ask:

Who am I willing to tell when I can’t do this alone?

And healthcare leaders should be prepared to answer a question of their own:

When a nurse finally says, “I need help,” have we built a system that actually listens?

🤔 Have you seen Do No Harm? Who are you willing to tell when you can’t do it alone? Tell us in the comments below.