The Waiting Room: Documenting the Uninsured & Publicly Insured in Oakland

Elien Becque is a writer living and working in New York City. Her works have appeared on the Atlantic Wire, rollingstone.com, iVillage.com and in New York Magazine.

Though the unnamed context in Pete Nicks’ new documentary, “The Waiting Room,” is the vast divide in heath care access between the haves and the have-nots, the film’s power is in its fiercely local focus. The setting is Highland Hospital’s Emergency Room in Oakland, CA. Nicks and his crew set their cameras rolling as the waiting room fills to capacity every day with both true emergencies and hundreds of people trying to obtain basic healthcare. The resulting story is of the common people—a portion of America’s 50 million uninsured—which CHMP’s Film & New Media Series screened on Thursday, Nov. 17^th.

While taxpayers pay about 70% of insurance premiums on high-quality healthcare policies for Congress members and their families, lawmakers continue to debate and make position statements regarding what the rest of Americans need in terms of healthcare. Meanwhile, 250 people pass through Highland’s waiting room every 24 hours, many of whom will return within weeks to have a prescription filled or a bullet wound checked. Nicks tells a story of everyday suffering from the point of view of the elderly, the disabled, the immigrants, the recently laid off, or the just plain poor as they struggle through a healthcare system stretched to the breaking point. The system’s entry point is the ER at Highland because, as one doctor describes it, the ER is a social safety net that accepts anyone who walks through the door. The film’s intimate perspective, that of people who have nowhere else to go, brings seemingly intractable political problem to the social level, rendering it a human problem.

Though Nicks is pointedly not an activist filmmaker, his subject matter hardly escapes the question “The Waiting Room” is careful not to ask: “What to do?” A social media spinoff project is the initial answer. For now, whatruwaitingfor.com is a repository for hundreds of film clips of conversations taking place in the waiting room at Highland Hospital. Conversations are of the people, by the people and topics range from health to money problems to politics and faith. The library has essentially become a collective voice for change from a culturally disparate group of the medically disenfranchised; collecting these stories together is the first step in what the filmmakers call a “Community Engagement Project.” By taking the power of narrative beyond the realm of the well-financed filmmaker, whatruwaitingfor.com turns back around after the wrap party to present the subject matter itself with storytelling as a tool for change.   Elien Becque

Photo Credit:Martin Dornbaum, Director Health Professions Education Center Hunter College- Brookdale Campus

Post screening panel: Pete Nicks, Jamilah King, news editor at Colorlines.com, Tonya N. Walker MD, attending physician in the department of Emergency Medicine Center at New York Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, Sheena M. James RN, BSN, Emergency Medicine Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center and Hannah Rosenzweig MPH, CHMP Senior Fellow and co-curator of the Health in Film and New Media Series.

Elien Becque is a writer living and

“Must See!” Films Public Policy Films from a Student’s Perspective reviews “NOW: Nurses Needed”

This post was written by Jennifer De Jesus a student in the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter and an avid movie watcher. She is also an employee of the Health Professions Education Center, which has one of the largest collection of health films in the New York City area.

In the path towards universal health care, an important step is revising our current health care structure, one that can hardly support the changing demographics of the American population. To truly provide better health care, more trained nurses must be incorporated into the system. The solution however, is not to simply increase the number of nurses, but to address issues that affect nursing schools, nursing faculty, burnout of nurses, and placement of nurses in needy communities.

NOW: Nurses Needed on PBS examines how the shortage of nurses is placing strains on the entire health caresystem, as well as efforts by hospitals to remedy the situation. According to a HRSA government study , by the year 2020, there could be a nationwide shortage of up to one million nurses, meaning more patients per nurse, which could result in poor quality for hundreds of thousands of patients.

“If there was ever a time in the history of this country when one thought about the match between a profession and the changing needs of people in the country, this is the time,” Dr. Mary Naylor of the University Of Pennsylvania School Of Nursing explains to NOW reporter, David Brancaccio, during the program. Dr. Naylor also points out that people are not only living longer, but are also living with more chronic conditions, which significantly increases the demand for nurses.

Another contributing factor to the nursing shortage has been the shortage of faculty at nursing schools. According to the AACN’s report on 2010-2011 Enrollment and Graduations in Baccalaureate and Graduate Programs in Nursing, nursing schools in 2010 turned away 67,563 qualified applicants from nursing programs citing, “insufficient number of faculty, clinical sites, classroom space, clinical preceptors, and budget constraints”. Fewer nurses are choosing to teach the next generation of professionals, resulting in thousands of applicants being turned away from the nation’s nursing schools. Potential nurse educators are instead remaining as senior nurses or turning to pharmaceutical (companies) for employment, which pay more than becoming faculty at a nursing school.

Higher wages and better benefits would decrease the gap in pay between clinical and academic nurses, increasing the retention of nursing professors, as well as encourage potential professors. A remedy to nursing faculty salaries revolves around funding, in which a collaboration between public and private donors can be formed. This partnership would allow nursing schools to increase salaries and benefits, as well as hire more faculty.

Another solution is to encourage more nursing graduates to pursue teaching careers. After all, the gap between tenured faculty and novice faculty is significant, with the former within a decade of retirement. Such bills, as the Affordable Care Act, provide more funding for doctoral students, financially encouraging nursing students into academia.

Hospitals have reacted differently to the shortage. Touro Infirmary in Louisiana is offering monetary incentives, special pay plans, as well as recruiting foreign nurses. Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore offers the benefit of paying 50 percent of any college tuition for the children of nurses. Other hospitals are participating in a national wide initiative to provide nurses with a one-year residency. The University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC) and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) Nursing Residency Program provides critical guidance in the transition of new graduate nurses into the professional setting; all with the intention to strengthen their commitment to nursing.

With roughly 100 Nursing Colleges, the UHC’s and AACN’s Residency Program is a good first step towards the national collaboration needed to handle the increasing demand for nurses. Like health care, the nursing shortage is not something Americans can afford not to fix.

Jennifer De Jesus

This post was written by Jennifer De