The problems Nicks saw during the five months he spent in Highland’s waiting room, he says, are common enough, and widespread enough, that everyone is affected, no matter how isolated or protected they may feel. The site also gives viewers an opportunity to choose particular themes - access to care, violence and chronic disease, for example - that may be especially relevant to them. That’s the rub, the essence of the debate to some people this system is acceptable and to others it’s completely unacceptable.” “You’d be hard-pressed to watch the film and say this is a health care experience you’d want to go through,” Nicks says. Nicks says the film and the storytelling website are slated to be incorporated into medical school curriculums, universities and other schools as part of an effort to expand the conversation about health care. “I have enough trouble trying to help my daughter I can’t help somebody else’s.” “I know you like what you are doing, but … taxpayers are supporting these needs and everybody thinks it is OK,” says one commenter, Bob Weeks, in a posting online. Though Nicks seems to side with Obama’s vision for the future, the digital storytelling site is also receptive to people who disagree with the idea. He hopes it will be a space where the real meat and potatoes of Obama’s Affordable Care Act can be hashed out by anyone who cares to have a say. That’s where the digital platform comes in. The policy details, Nicks decided, were too intricate to delve into with the film, but they were also too important to ignore altogether. He wants to examine what works, what doesn’t, and where to go from here - and he wants to do so by having ordinary people tell their own stories.Īs viewers of “The Waiting Room” will learn, the movie is short - devoid, really - of statistics, data or big picture thinking of any kind, focusing instead on the narratives of the uninsured. Using “The Waiting Room” as a launchpad, Nicks has already started developing what he calls a “digital storytelling project” about the nation’s health care system. Nicks has larger ambitions than filmmaking. That’s what was missing in the conversation around health care.” “All these people who wouldn’t normally sit down and meet each other were now bound together by the condition of needing help. “Fortunes change,” says Nicks, who earned his ¿master’s in documentary filmmaking at UC Berkeley. Another day a man who had worked for Richard Nixon came in after suffering a stroke. Almost overnight, dozens of Africans living in Alameda County were at the man’s hospital bedside with instruments, singing, dancing and partying. One day, for instance, a renowned drummer from West Africa got sick and wound up in the hospital. OAKLAND - When Bay Area filmmaker Peter Nicks started working on “The Waiting Room,” his documentary about Oakland’s Highland Hospital, one fact stood out immediately: the overwhelming diversity of the human stories he encountered.
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