A Highland Hospital physician is debuting a brand new documentary on the San Francisco Movie Competition this weekend, providing an intimate take a look at the relationships between the hospital’s chaplain and its medical doctors and sufferers.
Filmed over seven years, “The Chaplain and the Doctor” follows filmmaker and doctor Dr. Jessica Zitter and Alameda Well being System Chaplain Betty Clark of their efforts to supply care to sufferers of the East Bay’s solely Degree I Trauma Heart.
“If you can figure out ways that you can cross professional silos, barriers between patients and doctors, working with colleagues from different backgrounds – those make us stronger and better,” Zitter stated in an interview with Bay Space Information Group. “That’s rare in medicine, and it’s allowed me to open up and become a stronger healer.”
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“The Chaplain and the Doctor” is Zitter’s first feature-length movie, the place she makes an attempt to check and distinction the secular strategy to drugs with Clark’s interactions and meditations on affected person care. By way of that effort, Zitter stated, medical professionals can strategy a affected person extra holistically and take away the “labels and judgments” in opposition to sufferers.
Although filming of the documentary started in 2018, Zitter stated its origins got here from her relationship with Clark within the seven years prior. Zitter stated she discovered herself taking audio recordings of Clark whereas she spoke with sufferers, and she or he observed how the chaplain’s work reworked her strategy to affected person care.
Highland Hospital offered a novel setting for Zitter’s inquiry into affected person care. As a “safety net” medical heart that gives service to low-income people, the uninsured and different susceptible populations, Highland Hospital was a novel venue to discover the intersection between medical and religious well being look after sufferers, she stated.
“The original title was going to be the ‘Chaplain of Oakland,’” Zitter stated. “I wasn’t going to be in the film. But I needed to do it, and Betty (Clarks)’s glad I did. When you see yourself on camera, even if you knew why you were making the film, things become clearer.”
Zitter’s movie crew obtained uncommon entry to Highland Hospital’s trauma wing, which she acknowledged was a “brave and vulnerable” determination by directors to allow. Alameda Well being System CEO James Jackson stated their collaboration on movie couldn’t have been made wherever else.
“We all know that health is more than medicine; it is also spiritual, emotional, and social. Yet, too often, health care fails to affirm the full humanity of both patients and providers,” Jackson stated in a press launch.
“The Chaplain & The Doctor” will debut at The Marina Theater in San Francisco on April 21, with a second exhibiting slated for the Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive on April 23. Zitter stated she hopes that audiences embrace collaboration throughout professions and embrace the views totally different from their very own.
“It’s been very liberating to me to drop silos and barriers in a new way. It’s allowed me to feel like a better healer, and I wasn’t able to do that with the medical perspective alone,” Zitter stated. “That’s a message for this day and our times: celebrating difference is something that can make us all stronger.”
