EWA winners include health-related stories
Filed under: Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
The Education Writers Association announced the winners of the 2010 National Awards for Education Reporting yesterday. Since education and health frequently intersect, I took a look at the stories mentioned and found some worth pointing out.
- A special citation went to Courtney Cutright, of The Roanoke Times, for “Autism: Breaking Down the Barriers.”
- Rebecca Catalanello, of the St. Petersburg Times, also earned a special citation for “His pills cause her pain.”
- Ann Dornfeld, of KUOW Puget Sound Public Radio, received a special citation for “Recess Disparities in Seattle Public Schools.”
Related tip sheets
Health and education: Two intersecting beats
Health and education: Reporting resources
The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust awards $1.1 million grant to support health journalists
The Center for Excellence in Health Care Journalism, the educational arm of the Association of Health Care Journalists, has been awarded a grant of nearly $1.1 million to improve training resources for health journalists.
The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust made the three-year grant of $1,097,000 to the Missouri-based center to increase the range of training opportunities for current journalists and to help develop new health journalists across the country.
“The real stories on the state of health care can be found at the local level,” said Len Bruzzese, executive director of AHCJ. “The Helmsley Trust’s generous support will allow us to expand our training in underserved geographic areas and in underreported topic areas to better assist local reporters in telling those stories.”
The funding will support the annual conference of the association, starting with Health Journalism 2011 this spring in Philadelphia; regional workshops on niche health topics; an annual rural health journalism workshop; and three conference fellowship programs assisting ethnic media, rural reporters and journalists on non-health beats who routinely face health-related stories, such as education, environment, business and government.
Significantly, the funding will allow the continuation - and expansion - of an intense regional fellowship program that has trained dozens of journalists in Kansas and Missouri over the past four years. Each year, the new AHCJ-Regional Health Journalism Fellowships program will select 10-12 reporters, editors and producers from a different region of the country for customized training. The yearlong fellowships are meant to improve abilities to provide meaningful coverage of critical issues and assist and motivate fellows to increase such coverage.
The funding also will allow updates to the technology used to produce the association’s website, www.healthjournalism.org, and to increase the resources available there. The site assists reporters working on health-related stories with tip sheets, reporting guides, government data, training presentations and resource links.
“As America struggles with access and the rising cost of health care, it is important that the information on choice and cost is available to the consumers. New technology allows consumers to manage their healthcare closer to home and at less cost. Giving journalists access to information on those technologies is important to the Helmsley Charitable Trust,” noted Rural Healthcare Program Director Shelley Stingley. Read more
MIWatch.org calls for real disclosure reform
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Pharmaceuticals, Studies
Phyllis Vine at MIWatch.org, a site that follows news about mental illness, asks whether drug company disclosures about payments made to doctors go far enough and whether anyone actually pays attention to such disclosures.
Vine raises the question of doctors taking part in “educational settings, including grand rounds, courses at professional conferences, or continuing education programs that pharma spends billions of dollars underwriting.”
She addresses the disproportionate number of psychiatrists who represent pharmaceutical companies and dominate the upper bracket of paid speakers. Vine also notes that, while many schools have drafted or are drafting policies about faculty-industry relations, enforcement of those policies is questionable.
Read the whole post on MIWatch.org.
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.
Ky. county to warn coaches about air pollution
In a story that shows how health stories can span several beats, James Bruggers, writing for the Louisville Courier-Journal’s kentuckianagreen.com, reports that the Jefferson County School District (which includes Louisville) will now share air pollution warnings with district coaches, who may then use that information to alter practice schedules.
The decision comes as a statewide sports safety work group created by the Kentucky General Assembly is scheduled to take up questions about air quality and outdoor practice at a meeting Thursday in Lexington. The Kentucky High School Athletic Association also is weighing possible recommendations on air quality and sports practices to its 279 members.
Bruggers found that, right now, such advisory practices (and more severe restrictions) are not widespread nationwide. “Bruce Howard, spokesman for the National Federation of High School Associations, said he has not heard of any schools or school districts anywhere in the nation with formal policies curbing practice during air quality warnings,” Bruggers wrote.
Seven Texas schools seek tier-one status
Holly K. Hacker of The Dallas Morning News has a story about Texas universities seeking to be “tier-one” institutions. As Hacker explains, “tier-one” universities are “where researchers make the next big breakthroughs in science or engineering and where top scholars teach the next generation of leaders and problem-solvers.”
Tier-one universities help the economy, attract students and researchers from out of state and encourage students to stay in state for their education.
They also receive “hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants from groups like the National Institutes of Health.”
Hacker is having a live chat at 11:30 central time today (Monday).
-
Join us in Atlanta
for Health Journalism 2012
Fellowship applications
due Feb. 27
New at HealthJournalism.org
- Data gives depth to investigation of patient safety
- What reporters should know about Alzheimer’s and related dementias
- Apply for fellowships to attend Health Journalism 2012
- AHCJ asks Supreme Court to permit broadcast of arguments in health reform case
- Tips for print, online journalists to embrace broadcast opportunities
- Numbers reveal how often, or how rarely, states check doctors’ disciplinary records
- 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
