What does cinema tell us about the crisis that public hospitals seem to be perpetually going through today?
What’s interesting is that between a hospital filmed in the United States in the 1970s, as is the case with Hospitaland an establishment which would be today in France, the observation does not change.
The hospital remains a vantage point for social misery and, even if it still welcomes all the sick, the emergency rooms no longer have the means to treat them as well as possible. Wiseman films very crudely saturated waiting rooms for example. We see in particular a person waiting on a stretcher and, at her side, stretcher-bearers who comment on the situation by saying that if she had money, she would go to the private clinic next door to be treated more quickly. In France today, we see these excessively long waiting times, the lack of beds, the lack of staff. Between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m., the estimated time spent in the emergency room of the public hospital of Paris (AP-HP) is 348 minutes, or almost six hours!
Similarly, a scene shows a psychiatrist trying to contact a social worker for a homosexual minor who is a prostitute, and whose family refuses to help. He gets nothing, the phone is hung up on him. In France today, there is this same silo operation that “prevents”. There is a lack of transversality between the different services.
