The Waiting Room – Documentary To be Aired on PBS Next Year

From the blog item A Lens on Health

I was fortunate enough to attend a screening last week of The Waiting Room, a unique lens on public health and our current health system.

The screening was part of the Center for Health, Media and Policy’s ongoing Health in Film & New Media Series series; it was was one of the best films I have seen about health, about people, about hopes and dreams in the inner city.

Director Peter Nicks conducted interviews with dozens of patients and staff in the Emergency Department of Highland Hospital in Oakland, CA. He gathers a rather sobering portrait of safety net health care and those that would fall through the cracks without it. Overworked and sometimes exhausted doctors and nurses care for anyone that needs it in this understaffed and overcrowded ED.

The hospital’s waiting room holds dozens of stories. The ones that patients want tell to the intake nurse, to the doctors, to the camera, to the stranger sitting next to them. The waiting room is a place of last resort for the Hell’s Angel, the newly unemployed executive, the drug addict, the displaced blue collar worker, who wait for care and hope to be treated as more than just a number……

Read the entire blog item by  a health care journalist (name is not on her blog,even her bio)