The Waiting Room

The Waiting Room blog post

It is easy to take for granted our free health care system as a Canadian citizen. If we were presented with receipts stating the cost of our latest doctors visit paid courtesy of the Government of Canada, I am sure it would put it in perspective just how fortunate we are to live in a nation where visits to the family doctors office feel like a basic inherent civil right. Sure we have our share of problems with the system here in Canada, but have we ever been frustrated enough to consider trading places with our Southern neighbours? The documentary film, The Waiting Room, offers an 81-minute candid journey into the perseverance and daily reality facing patients, doctors and staff caught up in the American healthcare system at the Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. This film offers an insider’s perspective on the inner workings of a health care system that is so different from our own in some ways.

Many young Canadians learn, in the early years of junior high school, the basic fundamental differences between our two healthcare systems and that we are privileged to be living in a nation that will not turn away it's citizens in our most vulnerable moments. The American healthcare system is often a hot topic for debate between Republican and Democratic leaders during election time, which in turn spills over into our Canadian media content. When I hear about the healthcare debates in the U.S I often wonder: how can a nation with an estimated GDP of $15.8 trillion in 2012, according to the U.S National Economic Trends, deny its citizens a very basic right to be treated in the direst times? It was curiosity that motivated me to see Michael Moore’s film Sicko in 2007, to shed light on this issue that is merely 140 km away from my hometown. I thought Sicko was a great and informative journey into the backward policies of American healthcare, but of course some of the messages were extremely dramatized to garner shock-value in true Michael Moore fashion. I appreciated the journey by boat to Cuba too seek health care, it made for great entertainment, but the majority of Americans aren’t travelling in boats making highly dramatized entrances for medical care. You will find most Americans in the countless waiting rooms strewn across their vast nation, many of them nervously waiting with their fate in the hands of their insurance provider, if they are lucky.

This documentary film The Waiting Room covers the very diverse and captivating stories of Americans inter-woven in the system at the Highland Hospital. The documentary is shot in an observational style, often called cinema verité, which presents a reality soaked multiple-character driven account of the many trials facing an un-insured patient in the U.S. health care system. The filmmaker, Peter Nicks, skillfully chooses diverse characters that have very different outlooks and are facing very different situations to color the greater message of the film looking at the broken system in its entirety. I was heavily captivated by each characters story and often pulled into the characters shoes: from a father fearful for his daughters well-being to an elderly man needing dialysis but more accepting to death than another waiting room at the hospital. The filmmaker does an amazing job empathetically connecting the audience to each patients fears and frustrations by offering a strip down bare bones account of their thoughts and reactions to the developments in their medical problems. The sound was predominantly natural ambiance in each setting, which evoked connectivity to the environment, and effectively transported the audience to the sensory surroundings of the waiting room. The film demonstrated journalistic objectivity by showing positivity in the systems as well by showing cheerful staff members trying to make the most of their daily work—the nurse with red rimmed glasses giving a gangster  patient a comical tongue lashing—and also glowing results from patients that had undergone emergency procedures stating the superiority of American emergency room surgeons.

One relation that Canadian and American health care systems share, is the inevitability of wait times. It was shocking in the film when patients of the Highland Hospital were given wait times as long as a month for MRI scans, it was a dramatically highlighted point in the film. In Manitoba, Canada, the average wait time for an MRI at the Health Sciences Centre is 16 weeks according the Manitoba Government's website: a very similar range of time.

In a recent experience of mine at the Health Sciences Centre I was waiting in the emergency room untreated for 7 hours suffering from severe food poisoning. After wait times were pushed back yet again, because of an insurgence of ambulance patients—not un-common for Manitoba—I decided to leave un-treated so I could attend school in the morning. This all-too-common situation allows one to see a common factor between our two systems: that health care is often a safety-net institution. This speculation is also tactfully suggested in the documentary. In fact, most of the patients that were ahead of me on the waiting list at the Health Sciences Centre knew the staff by name.

I wonder if the Highland Hospital has ever had mortality in their waiting room like the tragedy that happened to Brian Sinclair who died while waiting untreated for 33 hours in the Health Sciences Centre. Perhaps the U.S systems has mortality problems of their own. On May.15^, 2012, a message was given to physicians by T.R Reid, a notable journalist specializing in healthcare systems, at the 67th annual Ogden Surgical Medical Society conference that stated:

“Roughly 22,000 Americans die every year from treatable diseases because they can't afford to go to a doctor.”

Upon watching the documentary film and experiencing the Canadian health care system for myself, it is evident that each of our healthcare system’s in our affluent nations are far from perfect. But one thing was definitely made very clear by The Waiting Room documentary: the Americans health care system has a long way to go.