![]() It was all about the uninsured, not the individual stories. It was a privately financed film about the uninsured. So I called them up and they needed a producer, and I joined their team. Her first month back at the hospital she came home and said, “Guess what? They’re making a documentary at the hospital.” And it turned out it was Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Freidman, who I know very well. I moved back and my wife took her job back at the hospital. I moved to New York and was working at ABC for a few years. There’s a complicated story parallel to that. African tribes rallying around their brother who got injured and he’s a star drummer in Africa and here he’s just an uninsured guy. People coming to the hospital, taking three buses and a taxi and maybe walking the rest of the way and not having money to get home. I was attracted to the power of the stories. I first started thinking about this in 2001, well before the noise around the health care reform got crazy and ideological and political. The power of the stories I heard, in terms of what patients were going through on a day-to-day basis, that wall that they had to climb everyday-whether it was showing up in the waiting room or whether it was trying to make an appointment in a clinic or work through rehab. My wife works at the hospital, so that was my entry point. Where did the idea for The Waiting Room come from? And how did the film get made? Peter Nicks, the film’s director and an alumnus of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism (the school that produces Oakland North) sat down with Oakland North reporter Adam Grossberg to discuss the project. The film’s website, collects digital content-video, photographs, and text-and arranges it based on issues and emotions in a scalable framework that can be replicated in communities across the country. The project is meant to share collective health care experiences in the hope of illustrating the needs of underserved patients. In total, it took fourteen months to edit the final 79-minute film from 175 hours of footage.Īccompanying the recently completed film is an elaborate online, interactive “Storytelling Project” centered on social media and community engagement. Shot over a two-month period in 2010, the film uses intimate access and a cinema verité approach to show a “composite day in the life” at Highland Hospital. These stories are juxtaposed with the struggle that doctors and nurses face everyday-managing a limited number of beds and supplies while providing prompt care. The tension between trauma and acute care builds in the waiting room at Highland Hospital, resulting in long, frustrating periods-sometimes as long as twelve hours-spent waiting for basic medical attention.ĬJ, a nurse at Highland Hospital, in a production still from the upcoming film, “The Waiting Room.”įocusing on a handful of characters-a young girl with a serious bout of strep throat, a carpet layer suffering from painful bone spurs, a man brought in after overdosing on a number of drugs, an uninsured patient turned away from Kaiser on the day of his scheduled surgery to remove a testicular tumor-the film traces the entire course of waiting for, and receiving care, at Highland. Doctors and nurses juggle 236 beds-balancing limited resources in a delicate triage system to provide care to a community desperately in need. The emergency room sees about 80,000 visits annually. Almost every adult in the area who suffers a traumatic injury is transported to Highland Hospital, whether or not they are insured. The hospital is the source of primary care for some 250,000 patients. ![]() Highland Hospital, located in East Oakland at 31 st Street and 14 thAvenue, is a county-run, public hospital that serves as the major trauma center for the greater Oakland area, as well as providing the bulk of non-emergency medical care to uninsured patients in Alameda County. ![]() The film follows a group of patients and doctors as they struggle through the realities of the public health care system-lack of insurance, the high cost of care, a shortage of beds, and extremely long wait times. ![]() The Waiting Room is an upcoming feature-length documentary film shot entirely at Oakland’s Highland Hospital. ![]()
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