Documentary Analysis: The Waiting Room

The documentary The Waiting Room is about a safety-net hospital located in Oakland, California. In the film, director Peter Nix follows patients, doctors, and staff throughout a typical day. Furthermore, the film displays how the staff is overworked, and how the American health care system is affecting millions of uninsured patients who try to cope with injury and disease. The film utilizes techniques from the observational mode such as long takes, crisis structure, and documenting unplanned everyday experiences to convey the cruel realities of Americans seeking hope and treatment.

When focusing on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Systems strategies for improvement with unnecessary emergency room visits, a major key area is accessibility to health care at the appropriate health care setting. For many years, there has been the perception that the emergency department is the only place for someone who is uninsured or underinsured can go to receive the needed and appropriate health care, and in some situations that may be the case. (Rhodes et al, 2013, p.394) Due to the decreases in reimbursements for the publicly funded, more and more physicians are opting out to treating these patients, thus leading to an increase in emergency department utilization. According to a study conducted by Rhodes, Bisgaier, Lawson, Soglen, Krug, and Haitsma, this is becoming a greater concern for the

The Waiting Room is a 2012 documentary film and social media project directed by Peter Nicks that follows the life and times of patients, doctors, and staff at Highland Hospital , a safety-net hospital in Oakland, California. The project includes a blog which features stories and conversations from the waiting room as well as behind-the-scenes information about the project. Frequent video updates from the project are posted on the blog. These videos examine what life is like in an American public hospital caring for a community of largely uninsured patients. Many hospitals and health systems provide charity care for uninsured individuals when they require acute care, but the most forward thinking ones are also concerned with caring for this

The emergency services need to be called, and given all the correct information, such as, if you are with the casualty now, how many people are involved, the patients age/gender, if they are conscious. Computer software then uses this information to determine the priority of the call which is then categorised into emergency or non emergency.

The documentary “Fed Up” provides some important and disturbing details of the food industry. The 1977 heart disease and diet study known as the McGovern Report warned that the obesity rate was increasing rapidly due to American diets in fatty meats, saturated fats, cholesterol, and sugar. The food industry vehemently denied these claims, but the American people still demanded lower fat food products. The food manufacturers found that the fat removal made the food bland and unpalatable so to address this they replaced the fat content with sugar. Both the documentary and the Harvard Nutrition Source discuss the role sugar has in health conditions such as obesity and type 2 diabetes. They both link the consumption of sugar as the causality for

Triage is usually the first step of the emergency room and helps determine severity of each patient. Once through triage, the patient

The documentary The Waiting Room, is about a safety-net hospital called Highland Hospital located in Oakland, California. In the film, director Peter Nix follows patients, doctors, and staff all throughout a typical day at the hospital. Furthermore, the film displays how the staff is overworked, and how the American health care system is affecting millions of uninsured patients who try to cope with injury and disease. The film utilizes techniques from the observational mode like: long takes, crisis structure, and everyday experiences that unfold spontaneously to transmit the cruel realities of uninsured patients who go to Highland Hospital seeking hope and treatment.

Additionally, urgent care centers have been able to offer patients an alternative to the significantly higher cost of emergency room visits. Following an emergency room visit, patients are charged according to the level of care they are receiving which is rated from minor to major injuries and illnesses. Insurance companies may reject coverage of patients who sought care for a low level injury or illness in an emergency room setting leaving the patient with a large bill for a moderate condition. In addition to the cost of the treatment, insurance companies charge patients an additional fee just for utilizing an emergency room. Furthermore, the cost of seeing an urgent care provider versus an emergency department provider is significantly cheaper.

One of the primary goals of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to provide affordable health care coverage and increase access to affordable health care to the community. Unfortunately, since the passage of the ACA, while there has been an increase in the number of people with health care coverage, those same people do not necessarily have access to affordable health care. Currently, the public views the Emergency Department (ED) as a safety net by the community it serves; as demonstrated by the increasing number of people who continue to seek treatment in the ED for non-urgent problems. Utilization of the ED for non-urgent care contributes to the rising costs of healthcare as treatment in this setting can be upwards of three times the cost

Lack of covered care leads the uninsured to local emergency rooms for varied health concerns. This issue will end up weakening the quality of care needed by individuals who are actually in need of emergency care because the care centers may become over populated and under staffed. In the US, there are fewer physicians per person than in most other OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries. A statement in an article written on PBS’ website, states “In 2010…the U.S. had 2.4 practicing physicians per 1,000 people- well below the OECD average of 3.1.”. Facts like these are quite unsettling, considering tax dollars are still being spent on high medical costs.

After watching 13th it didn't make me upset at all, it made me very sorrowful, to see some of the things that African Americans had to go through. I wonder how it would feel to be kidnapped and brought to another country, to be enslaved and then freed to only be, enslaved in a different way. Know that I have watched this documentary it oped my eyes on why things are how they are know. Everything that they said in the documentary was linked together one way or another, it’s like putting together a puzzle with a lot of pieces. One thing that really stuck with me from the documentary was when they were saying that, a lot of the african american leaders around the 1960 were either killed, imprisoned or fled the country and that's why there is not a lot of African American civil right leaders, because maybe people seen what happened to the civil right activist and didn't want the same thing to happen to them. After all I don’t blame them I would want to play it safe to. On the other hand I don’t feel

Urgent care clinics are for individuals seeking non-life threatening treatment. These clinics provide another level of care to the community and the intentions of urgent care are not to replace emergency

Improving the access and affordability of health insurance coverage for all Americans should be a primary concern for those who help create the laws of the land. At this date, there are roughly 44 million Americans without any type of healthcare coverage. Another 38 million people have inadequate health insurance (PBS, 2012). What this all means is that the people who need it the most are putting off seeing a doctor until last moment and then usually end up visiting an emergency room. If they cannot pay for the visit, the cost of that ER visit falls back on the taxpayers, people who have health

Urgent Care: In essence, an urgent care clinic bridges the gap between visiting the emergency room for a life-threatening injury and visiting your primary care physician that may require an appointment weeks in advance. Urgent care clinics offer an array of services from performing physicals and providing flu shots to treating minor

The emergency room has become the new primary care facility for the millions of uninsured in the United States. Thanks to an “unfunded mandate passed into law in 1986,” hospitals that participate in the Medicare program must “screen and treat anyone with an emergency medical condition” (Stephens & Ledlow, 2010). This unfortunately leads to emergency rooms full of people who may have something as simple as a sinus infection which then makes it really difficult for someone with a real emergency that did not require ambulatory transport to be seen in a timely manner. Another unfortunate result of this is that “over 1,100 emergency departments closed over the past decade” (Stephens & Ledlow, 2010).