Health Journalism 2010 will be in Chicago
Just announced: AHCJ’s annual conference will be at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in Chicago, April 22-25. We’ve secured a $139 room rate for attendees. Local and national AHCJ committees are starting the planning process. Ideas for sessions or workshops are welcome – submit them online.
More details will be shared in the weeks ahead, but set these dates aside now for the best annual training event in health journalism.
Charter class enters medical school - for free
CNBC reports on the charter class of the University of Central Florida’s medical school and its unique model that allows students to attend tuition free.
Dr. Deborah German, dean of the medical school, says it admitted 41 students in the school’s first class and donors have pledged enough money to cover each student’s tuition and living expenses for all four years.
The report says that most medical students have racked up more than $150,000 of debt by the time they graduate. The report includes discussion about whether coming out of med school debt-free might encourage some to go into primary care rather than more lucrative specialties, such as plastic surgery.
German says that when medical students enter school, most of them do so with dreams and a sense of altruism but that by the end of medical school, they are starting families and the reality of debt sets in, perhaps pushing them away from going into primary care.
The donors, according to German, include hospitals, banks, law firms, women’s groups and all kinds of businesses. The money comes without strings; the students are not committed to go into a particular specialty or practice in a certain location.
Wyeth paid university for ghostwritten articles
Filed under: Health journalism, Hot Health Headline, Public records, Studies
John Fauber and Meg Kissinger of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that Wyeth paid the University of Wisconsin to sponsor “ghostwritten medical education articles that downplayed the risks” of female hormone therapy - one of that company’s most notorious missteps.
Amid mounting concern regarding their safety and shortly before the discovery that Wyeth’s progestin and estrogen products were considered dangerous enough to bring a massive clinical trial screeching to a halt, five ghostwritten articles, paid for by Wyeth, were used in University of Wisconsin continuing medical education materials which promoted the benefits and downplayed the risks of the treatments.
The Wyeth company line is that the articles weren’t bad or misrepresented science, and that the titular authors of the pieces were given “substantial editorial control” over the “scientifically accurate content.”
William Heisel focused on DesignWrite (the ghostwriters behind Wyeth’s pieces) and suggested that reporters check out their own local institutions and ask questions about where money is coming from, ask if the big names of local scientists are helping to hide their dubious connections and to actively question the impartiality of the science itself.
Heisel also put together an entertaining piece regarding just how tickled some researchers are to put their name on ghostwritten work.
20/20 co-anchor to appear at health reform events
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Health care reform, Health journalism
ABC News’ John Stossel will either moderate or be the keynote speaker at health-care town hall meetings in Wisconsin, sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, an organization that is advocating against the public option in health care.
The organization’s Patients First Web site claims that the public option is a “back door to a total Washington takeover” and implies that the government would decide if “our grandparents are too old or too sick to receive the life-saving care they need.”
Americans for Prosperity has used the Internet to reach members and encourage them to speak out at town hall meetings held by legislators. See the stops scheduled on its bus tour.
Reporting on the public option a topic of webcast
Filed under: Health care reform, Health journalism
In a White House briefing on Tuesday, spokesman Robert Gibbs reiterated that that President Obama still prefers the public health insurance option in health care reform, despite increasing talk about alternatives.
In the most recent Talking Health webcast, AHCJ president Trudy Lieberman discussed the public plan option with Cathy Schoen, senior vice president for research and evaluation at The Commonwealth Fund, and Bruce M. Bullen, chief operating officer of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.
They offered their judgments on what we can expect. Two journalists who have covered the topic extensively, Los Angeles Times reporter Noam Levey and New York Times reporter Reed Abelson, provided their insights and suggestions for covering what will be a major story in the coming months.
Man-on-the-street interviews, recorded in April, revealed that few people really understood what a public plan is and how it might differ from a private plan.
Man claims he sold kidney for $20,000
Associated Press reporters Carla K. Johnson and Adam Goldman report on a man who says he was paid $20,000 for his kidney.
The reporters write that much of his story can be confirmed. The man who received his kidney calls the alleged $20,000 payment “an embellishment.” Nick Rosen, the man who gave up his kidney, made a video that shows him on a bed with what he says is $20,000.
Johnson and Goldman tell the tale while also looking at some of the larger issues of selling organs and the screening that transplant centers do.
Related
- Organ network looks to address regional disparities
- In a package for the Los Angeles Times, Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber looked at UNOS oversight failures and what distinguished the best organ transplant centers from their less-successful peers. Here, the duo tell AHCJ members how they put the project together (includes tips on accessing and using UNOS and other transplant data).
- GAO report on correcting deficiencies at transplant oversight agencies
Schools gear up to offer H1N1 vaccinations
Libby Quaid and Lauran Neergaard of The Associated Press write about schools across the country that are gearing up for widespread vaccinations against swine flu.
An Associated Press review of swine flu planning suggests there are nearly 3 million students in districts where officials want to offer the vaccine once federal health officials begin shipping it in mid-October.
If swine flu vaccinations go forward - officials are awaiting study results - children will be among the first to be vaccinated. The secretary of the U.S. Department of Education has said the best place for vaccinations would be through schools and a poll found that parents agree.
A sidebar explains what schools need to do to set up vaccine-shot clinics, with advice from the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
Quaid and Neergaard run down the preparations in a number of cities throughout the country, something that reporters should be able to localize and report on in their own communities.
Glitch kept data out of Nursing Home Compare
Filed under: Government, Health data, Health journalism
Duane Schrag of the Salina (Kan.) Journal reports on problems he found in the data behind Nursing Home Compare, the federal government’s online tool to help guide consumers in judging the quality of nursing homes.
Schrag says that an area nursing home announced it was shutting down because it couldn’t comply with a state fire marshal’s requirement to replace its sprinkler system. But a check of the Nursing Home Compare data found no fire safety violations for the facility for 2007 or 2008, despite the fact that it had been cited for several fire code violations in both years.
When the Salina Journal pushed officials to explain why the deficiencies were not showing up, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services discovered a software problem:
But a glitch in the software used by the federal government kept the reports from showing up in Nursing Home Compare. The software blocked more than 1,000 fire code violation reports involving Kansas nursing homes in 2006, a similar number in 2007 and almost 800 in the first six months of 2008.
Nationally, about 21,600 reports were blocked during that same period.
Officials at CMS say the software was fixed on July 23.
Schrag talked to nursing home administrators and found that most of them dispute the rankings that Nursing Home Compare assigns to them; the exception was a nursing home that had a five-star rating.
Pesticide clouds a risk for children in farming areas
The Los Angeles Times‘ Amy Littlefield reports on children, in this case in California’s San Joaquin Valley, who are sprayed with pesticide while waiting for school buses or on the buses.
There are laws and regulations in place to keep such incidents from happening but Littlefield’s opening anecdote is the third reported case in seven months. The three children were sprayed with a blend of liquid sulfur, gibberellic acid, insecticide and fertilizer.
“Children are almost like a different species in terms of how they metabolize,” said Nina Holland, the lead researcher of a UC Berkeley study that found children are more susceptible than adults to organophosphate pesticides. “We are talking about a very significant difference. We really need to look at protecting children.”
Two of the children in the latest incident say the tractor driver who was spraying the chemicals saw them but didn’t stop, a mental blow that one expert said is “as bad as the effects of the chemical or even worse.”
Two counties illustrate health care disparities
Anna Tong and Phillip Reese of The Sacramento Bee write about health care disparities. They use two local counties to explain many of the issues that are central to the debate over changing the nation’s health care system.
In Yolo County, where many people are uninsured, the residents are diverse in occupation and age. Placer County’s “demographics makes it one of the best for insurance coverage: wealthier, older residents employed by large companies.”
Tong and Reese explain the ties between being uninsured and health outcomes, as well as the cost to society. They also look at the types of businesses that dominate the two counties and point out that employers in Yolo County, where many people are work in agriculture, service and food industries, are less likely to offer insurance than in Placer County, where many people work in the financial industry, professional and business services and high tech.
Other factors they look at include the links between income, ethnicity, age and insurance coverage.
The package includes an interactive graphic that shows California’s counties and how many people in each are uninsured and a series of graphics that breaks down the number of uninsured based on race, income, age, education, employment status and place of birth.
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Awards for Excellence in Health Care JournalismDeadline: Feb. 3
- How I did it: Falsified charts in nursing homes linked to patient care
- Access Denied: Looking at a lack of health care availability
- Transparency & medical errors: Public reporting of patient harm is a potent force
- Focus on freelancing: Tips for buying liability insurance
- Why do some patients get stuck in hospitals for weeks, months?
- Investigate health professionals and the boards that regulate them
- Presidents of AHCJ, SPJ call for more openness from Obama administration
