When I began making This Too Is Healthcare: Bridging the Gaps, I thought I understood something about the American healthcare system. Like most people, I knew it from the perspective of a patient or a citizen reading headlines about costs, policy debates, and inequities. But I had never seen what it actually takes to train the people who will one day care for us.
Making this film gave me a rare view behind the curtain of healthcare education. Over the course of about a year, anchored by an intense summer of following students in the field, I documented participants in the Bridging the Gaps program as they stepped outside traditional medical training and into the communities where health is truly shaped.
The students I followed were preparing for careers across the healthcare spectrum. Some were future physicians, and many were training to become pharmacists, social workers, dentists, nurses, and movement therapists. What unites the Bridging the Gaps program is a shared commitment to understanding how the social conditions surrounding people’s lives influence their health.
Pictured above: Bridging the Gaps students conversing during program orientation ahead of their community-based summer internships (screenshot taken from This Too is Healthcare: Bridging the Gaps)
“Some were future physicians, and many were training to become pharmacists, social workers, dentists, nurses, and movement therapists. What unites the Bridging the Gaps program is a shared commitment to understanding how the social conditions surrounding people’s lives influence their health.”
Through Bridging the Gaps, students spend their summers embedded in community organizations, shelters, clinics, and public health programs. They are challenged to look beyond diagnoses and treatment plans and to grapple with the realities patients face every day. Housing instability, food insecurity, systemic inequities, and the many forces shape health long before someone enters a hospital.
What moved me most while filming was not simply the scale of the challenges they encountered. It was the humility with which these future healthcare professionals approached their work. They listened. They questioned their assumptions. They reflected deeply on what it means to show up in someone else’s community.
In those moments, healthcare began to look very different from the way it is often portrayed. It was less about institutions and more about relationships, understanding, and responsibility.
Pictured right/above: Bridging the Gaps students listening to guest speakers during a “curriculum day” that brings students from all participating universities together once per week.
As a filmmaker, I am drawn to stories that reveal the human systems beneath the systems we talk about in policy and politics. This Too Is Healthcare invites audiences to witness a formative moment in the training of healthcare providers. Through the film we witness students learning that medicine cannot be separated from the conditions of people’s lives.
When I introduce the film, I ask audiences to reflect on a simple question:
“How do the social conditions shaping people’s lives influence the kind of healthcare we provide—and the kind of healthcare we receive?”
I hope the film creates space for that conversation among healthcare professionals, students, community members, and anyone who has ever been a patient, which is all of us.
Ultimately, This Too Is Healthcare: Bridging the Gaps is about recognizing that healthcare is not confined to exam rooms or hospital wards. It is happening every day in neighborhoods, schools, homes, and community spaces. These are the places where people live their lives and where health is truly determined.
André Robert Lee
Filmmaker
Director of This Too is Healthcare: Bridging the Gaps
Pictured above: Director André Robert Lee at the premiere of This Too is Healthcare: Bridging the Gaps on October 6, 2025 at the The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
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This Too is Healthcare: Bridging the Gaps is creating dialogue. Visit the documentary page to learn more about the film and to request a screening for your group, community, department, organization, or conference attendees.
Watch the trailer
What happens when health and social service students learn not just from textbooks, but from the lived experiences of those they serve? Catch a look inside the film that is sparking conversation.