Betty Clark is an 80-year-old, African American hospital chaplain on staff at Highland Hospital, the trauma center in Oakland, California. Jessica Zitter is a white physician who has worked on the Palliative Care team with Betty for over a decade, caring for patients who are approaching the ends of their lives. Their relationship took years to develop, originally beset by racial tensions on the team and a professional hierarchy that siloes and divides. But over many years, the Chaplain takes on the role of mentor for the Doctor, inspiring her in ways of the heart that she never learned in her medical training.

Betty helps Jessica see how her medical training, with its valuing of efficiency and protocol over curiosity and conversation, leaves many of her patients, particularly patients of color, feeling shunned and distrustful. Jessica begins to see the prevalence and power of the biases and prejudicial behavior of healthcare providers like her. And Betty introduces Jessica to new approaches to caring that bring joy and healing, not only to her patients, but to herself. With time, their professional relationship blossoms into a deep and caring friendship which supports them both as they work to provide the best care possible, one patient at a time.

We follow Chaplain Clark and Dr. Zitter through a series of patient-related story arcs highlighting the film’s central themes of human connection and justice. One patient, a woman with sickle cell disease, shares her deep distress at being profiled by doctors as a drug addict when she comes to the emergency room in a pain crisis. Seeing the woman’s pain through Betty’s eyes, Jessica shudders as she remembers the way she was trained to “recognize” a drug seeker. In another scene, Jessica struggles to communicate with a frustrated woman, for whom a hospital scheduling error is causing dire financial and social consequences. Betty emphasizes the importance of being honest and transparent with patients, saying that even if someone gets angry, they can handle, and deserve, the truth.

The two bring very different, yet symbiotic, expertise and focus to the bedside. Jessica’s extensive medical experience feeds critical information to Betty, who leads with spiritual support, song, and prayer. Where Jessica may find it difficult to connect, Betty becomes family. Where Jessica often encounters distrust, Betty elicits joy. The mixture of faith and science that they bring to the bedside unlocks something caring, humane, and essential to the care of patients with serious illness. Ultimately, the combination of their offerings intertwines to provide something that is more than the sum of its parts. “We do our best work together,” Betty says frequently to Jessica.

As Betty starts to face her own health challenges, oscillating between the roles of chaplain and patient in her own hospital, Jessica witnesses more intimately the experience of patients of color in America’s hospitals – this time, with someone she’s grown to love. With Betty now a patient, badgeless and without her usual vigor, they both feel an urgency to finalize her advanced care plan, educate her family about it, and prepare them for an inevitable future within the broken healthcare system they both know all too well.

Director Biography - Jessica Zitter

Jessica Zitter is a documentary filmmaker, writer, physician, and founder of Reel Medicine Media, a non-profit devoted to transforming how people die in America. Dr. Zitter is the primary featured subject and a member of the team that created the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated Netflix documentary Extremis (2016). She went on to direct and produce the award-winning documentary Caregiver: A Love Story (2020), which examines the growing crisis of family caregiver burden in the United States. Dr. Zitter’s book, “Extreme Measures: Finding a Better Path to the End of Life” (2017), describes her evolution from a doctor focused on extending life at all costs to one more patient-centered and humanistic. Her essays and articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Time Magazine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, among others. She has also been featured on “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross, “The Doctors,” “Doctor Oz,” CBS Sunday Morning, and others. Recently named one of Next Avenue’s "Influencers in Aging," Dr. Zitter practices the unusual combination of critical care and palliative care in Oakland, California.