Online Program

Oral

Film Showing

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’ voiceover – offers a raw, intimate, and even uplifting look at how patients, staff and caregivers each cope with disease, bureaucracy and hard choices. The film is connected to a storytelling project. People in the waiting room are talking about taking action, access to care, family, poverty, chronic diseases, violence, and many other topics. People in the waiting room are feeling a wide range of emotions, including courage, faith, fear, frustration, gratitude, grief, hope and pain. This session will use video and media to demonstrate public health issues from an U.S. perspective.

Session Objectives: Discuss the practical problems that hospitals, patients, and medical staff encounter in the healthcare system, particularly in the waiting room of emergency departments. Discuss healthcare and public health issues as identified by media's producers and filmmakers.