Educational Media Reviews Online

Filmed in a suburban Montreal hospital (French with English subtitles), this video is a potent condemnation of mismanaged restructuring, budget cuts, and layoffs, and serves to illustrate how they negatively impact on today's health care delivery system. Emergency focuses on the emergency room setting, and portrays a staff, primarily nurses, who are angry and frustrated about their inability to be adequately staffed or have sufficient supplies to provide what they believe is safe, quality care. Through a series of interviews and ER footage, viewers gain a first hand awareness of the many stressors of working in an overcrowded, understaffed emergency room. We get to observe how staff deals with patient's lives, and how they prioritize patients and work to maximize outcomes. Yet despite the stress, frustration, and burnout, the staff still deeply care about the work they do and how through caring they so profoundly and meaningfully affect people lives. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, technical qualities are high and it appeals to a wide audience and variety of library collections. The single negative is that some viewers may loose some details and depth of emotions of the interviewees as we try to follow the English subtitles. Recommended.