Waiting for The Waiting Room

NOTE: This week's blog post is not about the Raptors or the NBA

Over this past weekend I went and saw the documentary The Waiting Room. The documentary films a day in the emergency waiting room of the Highland Hospital, a publicly funded facility "committed to maintaining and improving the health of all County residents, regardless of ability to pay," according to the hospital's mission statement.

The hospital has been in operation since 1927 and has around 73,000 visitors to its emergency room annually, which equates to about 200 visitors per day.

Often heavily congested and seemingly understaffed, the waiting room is filled with patients who have no health insurance and are either unemployed or underemployed.

The documentary followed multiple patients as they waited for care, revealing their various health afflictions while they did so. I found it remarkable how the filmmaker was able to translate to the viewer the mundane, painfully boring feeling of sitting in a waiting room all day with an annoying injury because that's what I felt in the 80 minutes watching The Waiting Room. I was waiting for the documentary to get interesting, only that it never did.
 
I felt like I was watching a story that's been told before. Michael Moore has documented the broken U.S. health care system in his documentary Sicko. It's a struggle for unemployed, uninsured citizens to receive health care in the U.S. and The Waiting Room only reiterated that fact. Financially, the subjects in the movie have no other choice but to use the Highland Hospital emergency room. Those subjects don't have family doctors they can afford, so long wait times mount. Patients featured in the doc were often showed frustrated by the wait times. Is this supposed to be compelling to the viewer, especially to a Canadian viewer?

To most Canadians, seeing an emergency waiting room filled with people is a common sight. Unless a patient has an immediately life-threatening affliction, the person will be sent through a triage process then placed on the waiting list. I've had to wait in an emergency waiting room three times. Once when I needed stitches to seal a cut I received during a basketball game - the wait time was around six hours. The second time was when I needed stitches to seal a cut on my chin - I was told I would be awaiting at least five hours so I left instead. The third time was when a friend suffered a concussion after a fight outside of a social. My friend was given attention promptly by an ER doctor, but still had to wait four hours before receiving a cat scan to ensure there was no brain hemorrhaging.

 Lengthy emergency room wait times are a problem in Canadian, where health care is publicly funded. So much so that the Ontario government and Winnipeg Regional Health Authority have announced plans to shorten wait times because they're too long.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is able to expedite care if a person can afford a family doctor or health insurance. The system favours those who have money and shuns those who don't. The U.S. system is such a contentious issue that it has divided the country in two politically, with the Democrats supporting and the Republicans opposing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The act aims to make health insurance more affordable through means of subsidies, mandates, and tax credits.


Although I found that The Waiting Room was unoriginal and boring at times, I could somewhat sympathize with the people of the documentary. Patients have no other alternative and the doctors are faced with a seemingly insurmountable daily work load.

While The Waiting Room didn't explicitly criticize U.S. health care, the stories weren't meant to support the system. The documentary tried to put a face to the millions of Americans without health coverage. It did so, but not in a way that compelled the viewer.