The Waiting Room

About the Project

The Waiting Room is a hyper-local media project that allows people passing through the waiting rooms of California’s public hospitals to express, connect and share their experience at a moment when seismic shifts are altering the landscape of health care in America. It is based on the premise that the expression and sharing of story by the under-served is vital to our nation’s understanding of the impact of public policy that is influenced by lobbyists and special interest groups. The project is also driven by the powerfully therapeutic benefits of providing a platform for people stuck in hospital waiting rooms to share their thoughts and feelings about their health and their lives; their hopes and their fears.

The Waiting Room will do this through a unique blend of locative media, the web and traditional documentary film that reveals a community disconnected from technology, the conversation about health care reform and equal access to care. The pilot project will follow patients and staff at the Alameda County Medical Center, a public hospital that serves the uninsured in the Oakland, CA area. If the pilot proves successful the plan is to expand the project to other waiting rooms in selected clinics and hospitals in California.

The Waiting Room will BUILD an interactive storytelling booth at Highland Hospital that would serve as a pilot to be replicated in other public hospitals around the country including inner city, rural, and Native American reservation clinics; PRODUCE content from the waiting room (both short videos and feature length film); COLLECT user-generated content from the story booth; CURATE the content on an interactive website that will link individual stories into rivers of conversation and elevate these conversations into the current national healthcare debate.

In keeping with the hyper-local nature of the project, the initial core audience will be those that pass through the waiting room itself: patients, caregivers and hospital administrators at Highland Hospital. The secondary audience – local community non-profits, and journalists – will be reached through strategic partnerships with organizations that are already working on behalf of patients and medical institutions that care for the under-served in the Bay Area. The core framework of the project (anchored by the interactive story booth) is replicable and relies on volunteers, citizen engagement and strategic partnerships for its sustainability. But first and foremost The Waiting Room gives the under-served a voice not just at a critical moment in their lives, but also at a moment of critical importance in the evolution of our nation’s health care system.

The Fledgling Fund Impact

The Fledgling Fund is pleased to support The Waiting Room because we believe that this innovative project will inspire real dialogue about our health care system that is backed up with real stories from patients directly affected. By combining multiple platforms, the project has the potential to reach diverse audiences and connect people from around the country with this conversation.