You wake up in the middle of the night and can hear your child calling your name.

You walk into your daughter’s room and sit down on the bed next to her, cupping her face with your hand as you ask her what’s wrong.

“It hurts,” she says.

You ask her what hurts. Her face is hot and her throat is swollen.

She points to her throat, to her chest, and it seems like she’s having trouble breathing.

You tell her that everything is going to be okay. You scoop her out of bed, help her dress and gather some food, juice and her blanket.

You don’t know what’s wrong, but you know need to get your child to the doctor, right now.

Your bus ride to Highland Hospital in Oakland seems to take forever as you stroke your daughter’s hair and wish that you’d been able to afford to gas up the car this week, but since you’ve lost your job, it’s been hard to keep the kids fed, the rent paid and the car filled up. You put your kids first. That’s your job as a parent. You just want to do right by your kids, and right now that means getting your daughter treated as soon as possible. You arrive at the hospital, and see a room full of people, many of them looking very sick. Some are in pain, some are embarrassed to even be seen at a public hospital like Highland. You line up to see the nurse in admittance, and hope you don’t have to spend too much time in The Waiting Room.

The Waiting Room is a documentary filled with many stories like the one I just set up. When I watched the film at Cinemateque in The Exchange District, I couldn’t help but feel the helplessness that the people in the film felt. People sat in the waiting room for hours waiting to be seen for injuries and sickness only to be made to wait even longer by incoming trauma cases. Clever people, kind people, angry people and more were all shown a tough compassion by the admittance nurses, just trying to sort out who the system should allow to see a doctor or get a bed, without letting anyone else fall through the cracks.

All of these people’s experiences were filmed simply, and tastefully from the perspective of a fly on the wall, capturing the good moments and the tragic moments of hospital life without background music to tell you how to feel, or narration to steer your thoughts. The film just let the stories and people pull us around the hospital, but with structure, making sure to touch on doctors explaining why they couldn’t release patients onto the street or nurses telling people with chronic pain that none of their visits were covered by insurance from anyone. It didn’t beat me over the head with its message that the system wasn’t working, but I got the message all the same.

The film made me feel thankful that I lived in Canada, but I also realized that this film showed some of the shortcomings of our own system as well. While the people in the film had to deal with wondering how they might ever pay for the care that could make them better, here in Canada, we still have to deal with long waiting times and packed hospitals in a system that no longer takes into account the amount of people who need long term care, or who keep having to be hospitalized because of social issues.Bureaucracy and politics in Canada can often get in the way of figuring out how to best treat patients, especially with an ageing population who more often than not needs long term care instead of emergency care. For a system that was built on the foundation that everyone deserves holistic care, Canada now falls short.

The public system of the United States coupled with its private hospitals leaves a lot of people having to choose between bankruptcy and care, but as Canadians, we can see many of the flaws of our own system through what is presented to us in The Waiting Room.

I would recommend The Waiting Room to anyone wanting to experience a film that follows a diverse and memorable set of people. It makes you smile and it can make you feel sick.

Hopefully not sick enough to have to go to the hospital, in the United States OR Canada.

***To find out more about the film, and see if there is a screening near you, as well as check out the innovative campaign to promote the film and the stories of the people in it, go to http://www.whatruwaitingfor.com/ ***