Hippocrates: Diary of a French Doctor

Summary

Τhis humorous quality film makes reference to a range of staff issues that could be generic, although set at a medical environment.

Benjamin is a young intern, starting to work at a Paris hospital. He appears confident and determined that he will soon become a successful doctor. The medical workplace reality however is a lot grimmer than he had imagined. A less welcoming approach to the new interns awaits, expectations and responsibilities are to the highest extent straight away, for characters that are not faultless and have to beat their insecurities. The trajectory of Benjamin (Vincent Lacost), along with Abdel (Reda Kaeb earned a Cesar for best supporting actor at this film), an obviously more competent foreign doctor who has to work as an intern because of his immigrant status, is set also with a critical view of the workplace environment, the FrenchHealthcare system.

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  Early on, Benjamin recalls one of his first E.R triumphs: treating a former classmate that he just couldn’t stand. He boasts that treating him like any other patient was when he became a real doctor. Being able to set aside personal conflict to act with maturity could be a suggestion that he has what it takes to make it in this high stakes, detail oriented profession. However, soon he starts making a handful of serious errors. Yet, the audience is neither encouraged to acutely blame the healthcare system nor the negligent people within it. Error and blame are not always compatible in a medical system hamstrung by budget cuts and an overworked staff.
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  Benjamin and Abdel, working in the same department, encounter a lot of the same problems – allowing us to see different ways of handling the same issues.Jaded and even sometimes lazy nurse staff add to the obstacles. When Benjamin is told the ECG machine often doesn’t work and is a hassle to set up by a nurse, he bypasses the procedure and heads home. But Abdel doesn’t take the lack of a pump for morphine as a valid excuse, asking the nurse to find one in a different department. The choices both have consequences; Benjamin’s decision causes one patient’s heart attack to go undetected, leaving a man dead and a wife wanting to know why. While under a microscope their choices seem like night and day, to the script’s credit, Hippocrates makes it easy to understand how choices like this get made. The characters are normal people, not intentionally negligent or ill-meaning. Once things are accepted as commonplace, bad practices just aren’t questioned anymore. It takes a pair of new doctors, shocked and horrified by a particularly bleak first week, to challenge the status quo.
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  The supporting staff at the film plays an important role when the two doctors’ responses to a patient’s case are assessed by a hospital committee. They call upon the right decisions being taken in unfavourable working conditions with regulations that do not apply, inadequacies of hospital equipment, overwork, and lack of supportive management. They even decide to take simple ‘vindictive’ administrative measures, whilst continuing to provide all possible care to patients. The doctors themselves struggle to balance strict profit-focused policy with their own personal values and bioethics adage “do no harm” (where the film gets its namesake). The story’s workplace scenario emphasizes that doing the right thing is sometimes much more complicated than it should be; but always rewarding.

Contributed by: Andria Antoniadou