Berens adds Poe Award to honors for ‘Seniors for Sale’
At its annual dinner on Saturday, the White House Correspondents’ Association will present AHCJ member and Seattle Times reporter Michael Berens with the Edgar A. Poe Award and $2,500. The award “honors excellence in news coverage of subjects and events of significant national or regional importance to the American people.”
Berens earned the prize for his “Seniors for Sale” series, which focused on Washington State’s booming adult home industry and the dangers of the regulatory gray area it often seems to fall into.
Mike Berens (left) accepts his Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism from AHCJ Board President Charles Ornstein on April 16.
According to the WHCA release, “the judges were impressed by the depth of reporting and the ability to tell a highly charged story with clarity.”
“Michael Berens’ stories not only revealed a systemic failure in the health care system, but led to a shake-up of the agency involved, regulatory changes to improve oversight and accountability and landed some caregivers in jail,” said the judges.
This is the second Poe Award for Berens; he shared the first in 2009 with Ken Armstrong for their investigation into MRSA in Washington hospitals.
Berens won first place in the metro category of the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism for the series. As mentioned in past posts, we’ve featured quite a bit of the series here on Covering Health, and here are a few posts to help you catch up on Berens’ award-winning work:
- Old, frail fall through the cracks in Wash. system
- Washington’s “adult homes” have less regulation, more neglect
- Brokers place seniors in homes without screening
- Members’ investigations prompt bills in Wash.
Old, frail fall through the cracks in Wash. system
In a series of articles, Seattle Times reporter Michael J. Berens looks at Washington’s adult family homes - legally sanctioned facilities in which the state licenses “homeowners to provide spare bedrooms and care for the old or frail who might otherwise have to live in nursing homes.”
These private residences — called adult family homes — were marketed as opportunities for seniors to live in cozy settings and familiar neighborhoods, close to family and friends, with more freedom and superior care.
The owners were given freedom, as well. To encourage this new industry, the state imposed few regulations — no requirements for a minimum level of employees or even, for many years, liability insurance.
Through interviews with more than 250 people, documents obtained through public-records requests and analysis of computer databases and disciplinary actions, Berens found that “thousands of vulnerable adults have been exploited by profiteers or harmed by amateur caregivers” in the state’s 2,843 adult homes.
The Times uncovered accounts of elderly victims who were imprisoned in their rooms, roped into their beds at night, strapped to chairs during the day so they wouldn’t wander off, drugged into submission or left without proper medical treatment for weeks.
In part two of the project, Berens reports on one home that was cited for numerous serious violations but remained in business. Part three will be published on Tuesday.
More information about how the series was reported and a list of other people involved in the project is included in the “About the series” sidebar.
The Times posted a searchable database of the state’s adult family homes.
Slim guide:
Covering the Health of Local Nursing Homes
Check out AHCJ’s latest volume in its ongoing Slim Guide series. This reporting guide gives a head start to journalists who want to pursue stories about one of the most vulnerable populations – nursing home residents. It offers advice about Web sites, datasets, research and other resources. After reading this book, journalists can have more confidence in deciphering nursing home inspection reports, interviewing advocacy groups on all sides of an issue, locating key data, and more. The book includes story examples and ideas.
AHCJ publishes these reporting guides, with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to help journalists understand and accurately report on specific subjects.
Other resources
- Aging Nation: Troublesome Health Care Issues
- Headlines an advocate for seniors would like to see
- The impact of aging upon health care
- Covering nursing homes and other issues of aging
- How will retiring boomers affect the national health agenda?
- You Can Run, but You Can’t Hide: Policy and Problems in Long-Term Care
- Biology of Aging: Sources and Resources
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- What reporters should know about Alzheimer’s and related dementias
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- Numbers reveal how often, or how rarely, states check doctors’ disciplinary records
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- Transparency & medical errors: Public reporting of patient harm is a potent force
