Filmmaker Peter Nicks, one of our guest speakers for April 2^nd, has released the official trailer for The Waiting Room, a documentary film he produced and directed that explores the daily struggle of patients and caregivers as they pass through the waiting room of Highland Hospital, a public hospital in Oakland, CA.

Highland Hospital, a vital part of the city of Oakland, CA, and the surrounding county, is stretched to the breaking point. It is the primary care facility for 250,000 patients of nearly every nationality, race, and religion, with 250 patients crowding its emergency room every day.

The Waiting Room is an immersive documentary film that weaves together several stories that unfold in surprising ways in the ER waiting room. It is an intimate rendering of the story of our health care system at a moment of great change told through the eyes of people stuck – sometimes for up to 14 hours – in the waiting room. The film tells the story of a remarkably diverse population – as well as the hospital staff charged with caring for them – battling their way through the seismic shifts in the nation’s health care system, while weathering the storm of a national recession. It is a film about one hospital, its multifaceted community, and how our common vulnerability to illness binds us together as humans.

Taking advantage of the fact that hundreds of people sit and wait for hours each day in Highland Hospital alone, we will transform the waiting room into a storytelling space and provide the human and technological resources for patients to tell and listen to stories on-site. At the heart of this effort is an interactive story booth to be built – in partnership with the Alameda County Medical Center – as a permanent feature into Highland Hospital’s waiting room. The booth will allow patients and staff the opportunity both to record their own story as well as view other stories from the community. The booth will ask the user to either respond to either a theme or issue-based question. Booth users – depending on the level of privacy they desire – will have four ways to communicate: video, audio, text and physical journal.

The community engagement project also includes a politically independent, hyper-local video blog that serves as a dynamic theme and issue-based story archive and launch point for dialogue on the problems facing the uninsured. The blog – which includes a collection of produced videos – is a simple, elegant extension of the community itself and will gather insights from the constant flow of people that pass through the Highland Hospital waiting room – and later others in California – over the next several years as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 is implemented.

This mix of user-generated and produced content will be delivered across a variety of platforms including television, radio, public spaces and the internet, giving hospitals, policy makers, journalists and the general public a greater understanding of the evolving relationship between our nation’s health care policy and people’s lives.

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