Macy Arn
College Writing ePortfolio
Brainstorming
You Must See the Award-Winning Film Code Black: Is the Healthcare System Broken?
Arrive at Hospital -> check in -> wait for 15-20 hours -> see nurse (maybe) -> physician care (if critical condition in C Booth) -> wait for paperwork to be filled out -> care/treatment given
1 Sentence Overview
Plot 250 words
Setting
Key people
Details about why each character/setting is important
Organized – director, title, year, awards, names
Next Review It – well compelling resonated
Quote others and film
Dig Deep on an Aspect – can go outside film
5 Quotes from 4 other reviewer
“Code Black means things are as bad as they can get. It means the "system" that is the county hospital is overwhelmed, as a body is overwhelmed during a heart attack, and may in fact be on the edge of death.” - Matt Zoller Seitz
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/code-black-2014
“So when the doctors move to a newer facility, one with both patient privacy and piles of paperwork, they feel constricted in their work. Much of the film deals with McGarry and his fellow doctors navigating their new world between the immediacy of their old ways and updated regulations.” - MARK OLSEN
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-code-black-movie-review-20140627-story.html
“At one point, McGarry explicitly states, “I don’t know much about politics or the economy; what I worry about most is our spirit.” He thinks the matter of everyone getting proper healthcare is as simple as it being right over wrong.” And the title “‘Code Black’ Review: Young Doctors In Love With Public Healthcare Minus the Annoying Paperwork” - Christopher Campbell
“he physical changes in the building reflect the structural changes in health care, which are now less concerned with immediate care, and more with covering their own liability. The idealistic young doctors are frustrated that more of their time is spent filling out forms than seeing patients and wait times in the ER are now stretched to 12 hours long (or more).” The problem the doctors are working to fix and bring acknowledgement to during the documentary. – Katie Walsh
“While tracing their journey through this ER, “Code Black” manages to encapsulate so much of what is wrong with our health care system, but also to point out what’s right, and to posit an attitude shift not just about health care but about how we as a society treat those around us who are in pain or suffering.” - Katie Walsh
In the old LA County Hospital, there was a different connection between patients, doctors, and everyone involved. Code Black director, Ryan McGurry states, "If you are an outsider, I see total chaos. But I see unity in that chaos, there is a team here coming together to save someone’s life" (McGurry, 1). As McGurry says, the chaos had unity within the C Booth in the Old LA County Hospital because there is a different mindset within it, drawled in many residents, patients, and viewers to this hospital. As the documentary continued, the building of the new LA County Hospital changes the purpose. The purpose is focused on the ER layout, new codes, and HIPPA. This ultimately caused the residents to believe "When we start all of this, it seemed so simple. We were going to help people, but the doctor, the system is sometimes bigger than you. It becomes this bucket of paperwork of saving someone's life" (Code Black). Unfortunately, because of all the new updates and codes the residents must follow, they do not feel the same connection they felt in the C Booth. This forces residents to look for ways to fix/change the system to improve the flaws.
IMDb page
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2759372/
'Code Black' documentary takes you inside the ER
Modern Healthcare
Life and death struggles aren't the only battles raging in emergency departments. There's also the less visible war between doctors' ideals and the challenges of practicing medicine in today's political and economic healthcare environment.
Dr. Ryan McGarry set out to show that tension in “Code Black,” a documentary in which he follows patients and fellow physicians at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center's emergency department.
He shows doctors and nurses swarming around patients in seeming chaos but explains the order in it all. McGarry also delves into the personal lives and motivations of other young doctors aiming to find their place while struggling to cut through bureaucratic hassles and help often desperate patients.
McGarry, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, did his residency at LA County, and made the documentary from 2008 to 2012 while in training there. “I didn't sleep,” he said. He was motivated to become a doctor by his personal experience fighting cancer.
Much of the film's action takes place in “C-Booth,” L.A. County's trauma bay, where the movie's website says “more people have died and more people have been saved than in any other square footage in the United States.
Director Dr. Ryan McGarry
McGarry said he hopes the film helps to “disarm” the debate over healthcare. “So often in American politics … it's often the rhetoric that takes over the discussion and not the actual issues that matter,” he said. “You can certainly have your opinion on healthcare, but debate it in our waiting room and it would certainly sound different.”
The film already has garnered a number of accolades, winning Best Documentary at the Los Angeles Film Festival and the Hamptons International Film Festival.
The film is scheduled to be screened at medical schools, hospitals and a few traditional movie venues through early December. Anyone wishing to schedule a screening for their organization or company can fill out the form at codeblackmovie.com/screenings.
‘Code Black’ movie review
July 10, 2014
Though set in the busy emergency room of Los Angeles County General Hospital, where the frenetic drama is at times reminiscent of the television series “ER,” the documentary “Code Black” is less about saving lives than it is about saving the American health-care system. That’s the most critical patient in this fascinating tale, which follows a group of idealistic residents in emergency medicine being trained in the hospital that, according to the film, gave birth to the modern E.R.
“Code Black’s” first-time director is one of those young trainees, physician Ryan McGarry, who interviewed his classmates and watched them work over the course of several years. Taking its title from the hospital’s in-house euphemism for “overwhelmed,” “Code Black” starts in 2008, before McGarry and his colleagues relocated to a new, state-of-the-art building.
As the staff leaves behind the chaos of the old, ill-equipped, facility, they still find themselves swamped — not just with sick people, but with paperwork. As one physician notes of the move, which took place in 2012, he now spends four times as many hours filling out forms as he does actually treating patients. Doctors at the old hospital were exempted from a lot of this work because of its obsolescent infrastructure.
Something is clearly wrong.
Yet the film isn’t a screed (against the Affordable Care Act or anything else, for that matter). McGarry presents a balanced, thoughtful and clear-eyed look at what, for many poor and uninsured people, is their only source of medical care: the public hospital. Though the film identifies no single culprit, its perspective on the nature of the dysfunction is clear. American health care is penny-wise but pound-foolish.
This viewpoint is summed up succinctly by a doctor who notes that thousands of dollars in emergency-room costs for, say, complications of diabetes might easily be avoided if someone were willing to pay for mere pennies’ worth of insulin a day.
This, of course, sounds like a prescription for what is often derided as “socialized” medicine. If preventative care were more affordable and widely available, the argument goes — and the cost spread out among all Americans — expensive critical services wouldn’t be the first recourse for so many patients. Nor would hospitals like this one be so swamped.
“Code Black” is a powerful and quietly damning film. While training his lens narrowly on the heroic workers in a single emergency department, McGarry has made a broad indictment of a system that is badly in need of surgery.