Talk about empathy. It was impossible not to feel it for both the patients and the hospital staff in The Waiting Room, a documentary that aired on PBS last night.
The film follows patients and hospital staff through 24 hours in the overcrowded Emergency Department of a charity hospital stretched to beyond its limits. More than 200 patients of various ages and nationalities shuffle into the waiting room at Highland Hospital in Oakland, most of them uninsured and unable to receive care elsewhere.
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They check in, take a number and wait. And then they wait some more, and then even more as three gunshot victims are wheeled in and the staff goes all-hands-on-deck to take care of them.
What struck me most about this film was how so many of the problems facing the healthcare system came out in a short 90 minutes. Carl Connelly, for example, has been picked up off the street. The staff knows him by name and knows that his pain has been caused by drinking and drug use. He will be fine, but they can’t release him because he has no place to go. The recovery program he’s been participating in won’t take him back. Instead, the hospital must keep him overnight even though he is holding up a bed and keeping others from being seen.
Another young man, Eric Morgan, arrives saying that he’s been diagnosed with testicular cancer at Kaiser but had his surgery canceled because he wasn’t a member there. (He’s also carrying his diagnostic test results with him in paper and CD format).
But the most stunning thing was that, contrary to perceptions about the ER, the staff acts neither hurried nor unfriendly to any patient. They are so compassionate, and because of that most of the patients stay calm. Triage nurse Cynthia Johnson steals the show, refusing to get flustered even one time despite being the wall between patients who have been pushed back in line and the doctors who will eventually see them. Dr. Aaron Harries, a resident, is visibly shaken as he prepares to talk to the family of a 15-year-old who has been pronounced dead after several attempts at CPR.
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If you missed the debut of this film, be sure to catch it tonight. Filmmaker Peter Nicks is hosting an online screening of the film and live chat at 10 p.m. ET.
