IDFA 1998
Westeinde. Dilemma's in een ziekenhuis
Hard Choices. Dilemma's in an Inner-City Hospital in the Netherlands
Ireen van Ditshuyzen
Netherlands
1998
150 min
n.a.
‘We don‘t know if you can understand us when we talk to you, but I will ask you a question that is easy to respond to: please, close your eyes...‘ By this method, a doctor in the Westeinde hospital tries to make contact with a Hindu Parkinson‘s patient who barely seems to speak a word of Dutch. For some problematical cases that hospital physicians are faced with, an unequivocal solution is just not available. This concerns ethical issues, like the question whether you should keep someone alive even if he indicates that he does not want to. The hospital staff are also confronted with unmanageable patients who single-handedly terrorize an entire ward or with people from other cultures, with whom communication is difficult or impossible. In this documentary in three parts all these problems are addressed. Life in the hospital is filmed from within, in direct-cinema style.
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