As we celebrate this year's Nurses Week, I am reminded of the Hippocrates saying that the goal of medicine is "to cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always." This, too, I learn through daily example from the amazing nurses I work with.

Here are a few important and often unrecognized considerations that patients and their families should be aware of when discussing code status with their health care team.

Communities need specially-designed psychiatric emergency departments. Private insurance companies should provide more and better community care for persons with psychiatric problems, and more community alternative programs for persons in emotional distress should be developed.

Policymakers should be aware that even well-informed patients with good access to primary care need the ER. Legislation should aim to increase availability of primary care, but not penalize for use of emergency services.

It's easy, when you have a degree of financial security, to have a real disconnect from the financial challenges that so many Americans face today. Yet our ER experience brought those challenges into sharp relief for me, and the impression wasn't pleasant.

The Waiting Room is a punch to the gut, an unblinking gaze at the real lives of people cast off and left out of the medical system in the U.S. Shot in cinema verité style, the film takes place entirely in the emergency room at Oakland's Highland Hospital.