THE WAITING ROOM: A CRISIS IN HEALTHCARE
Highland Hospital as a micro-economic predictive model of a pressing reality we’d all like to overlook and dismiss
Very recently, I stumbled across (I’m a peripatetic stumbler, it seems) a documentary film made in 2012 about my old alma mater (Highland General Hospital). Its title is ‘The Waiting Room’ and it consists of an hour and 22 minutes of video depicting the unending medical crisis that is the Emergency Department of Alameda County Medical Center (AKA: Highland General Hospital), in Oakland, California. This film, produced by Peter Nicks, has been critically reviewed by a number of different individuals and journals and if one had to summarise them all in a single brief remark, that remark would have to be ‘a compelling and poignant insight into the economically driven medical realities of poverty’.
And why, might you well ask, is this film of especial interest to me? If you’d followed the story of my illustrious medical career (‘A High-grade Chimp’) you would know the answer to that rhetorical question already, but for those who didn’t acquaint themselves with it, I was associated with Highland General Hospital for a number of years back in the 70s & 80s in the capacity of ‘Cardiopulmonary Program Coordinator’.
That rather florid title means I was in charge of the day-to-day operations of both the hospital’s…
