Handlung

Go behind the doors of an American public hospital struggling to care for a community of largely uninsured patients.

The Waiting Room is a character-driven documentary film that uses extraordinary access to go behind the doors of an American public hospital struggling to care for a community of largely uninsured patients. The film - using a blend of cinema verité and characters' voice over - offers a raw, intimate, and even uplifting look at how patients, executive staff and caregivers each cope with disease, bureaucracy and hard choices. It is a film about fighting for survival when the odds are stacked against you.—Anonymous

This documentary was made by PBS and filmed at Highlands Hospital in Oakland, California. The doc opens as patients come by bus to the Emergency Room. They are treated on a first-come first-served basis. This means that patients are seen according to when they arrive rather than the severity of why they came. The only exception is when someone comes in for the trauma room. When this happens, they receive immediate care and the doctors put the waiting room on hold. But instead of being ignored the patients are seen with compassion by the overworked medical staff.

The patients who appear at Highlands do not have health insurance. One of them even confided that his boss cut his pay giving him the reason that he could be replaced by others who will do the same work for less. In another sequence, one of the doctors telephoned a colleague shaming the other doctor into seeing a patient he couldn't handle.

The list of reasons for patients at Highlands varies: an out of work father brought his daughter in to be treated for strep, a belligerent patient is there for dialysis, another patient is there for bone spurs in his back. The patients are all treated compassionately by the medical staff. As each doctor reaches the end of shift, the waiting room only has a dozen patients rather than full like earlier. It's bitter-sweet because all problems are addressed but some can't be solved.

One of the doctors on staff confesses that many people who entered the profession were a direct result of the heroic portrayal of doctors on television shows. This 1 hour 21-minute doc shows the compassionate/caring results.