Highland Hospital nurse Cynthia Jackson. International Film Circuit To understand the stakes of America's health care debate, you don't need a trip to the Supreme Court—you could visit the emergency room of a public hospital instead. In the 24 hours chronicled by The Waiting Room, 241 patients pass through the ER. Some are young, others are old, a few are bleeding, many are chronically ill—nearly all of them are uninsured.
Emmy-award winning filmmaker Pete Nicks' fly-on-the-wall documentary never mentions Obamacare or any other policy topic, but the stories he tells are a powerful indictment of a broken health care system. The film is set at Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. Nicks has been wanting to make a documentary at Highland ever since he was fresh out of Berkeley j-school, around the same time his wife took a job as a speech pathologist at Highland. He had spent months on a storytelling project with patients in the hospital's waiting room before filming this documentary.
Nicks sat down with us in San Francisco, where the film will premiere this Friday. Click here for a list of where The Waiting Room will be screened.
Mother Jones: It struck me in the film that saving lives isn't necessarily about these heroics in the surgery room; it's about helping patients navigate this huge bureaucracy. You have scenes where an administrator is telling a young man how to pay for surgery and a doctor trying to figure whether the drug addict he's discharging has safe place to go—
Pete Nicks International Film CircuitPN: Yeah, it's more than a health care film. It's about a community that for generations has dealt with societal issues. People say that safety net hospitals are where social experiments go to die. You see a lot of homelessness, mental illness, unemployment—it's the manifestation of a lot of our social challenges. Health is just one piece of that.
MJ: You shot this documentary over five months but when you watch it, it comes across as one day in the hospital. Why did you decide to do that?
PN: The story of Highland is the waiting room fills up, the staff tries to clear it, and the next morning it fills right up again. We thought it was important to give the audience that sense of a relentless tide. For doctors it's like shoveling sand against the tide. The film doesn't have a main character, but there is an antagonist, and that antagonist is the system. It's a system that’s left an entire community under-resourced and patients flooding the waiting rooms seeking primary care.
MJ: Highland is known for its trauma unit and treating many gunshot victims, but you don't focus on that.
[Read more in the Mixed Media blog]
