How the NHS muzzles U.K. whistle-blowers
Victoria Macdonald of Britain’s Channel 4 News, with the help of the nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Journalism, used FOIA requests to expose the National Health Services’ habit of using “gagging clauses” and financial settlements to silence whistle-blowers.
In a number of requests made under the Freedom of Information Act we discovered that over the past decade 170 doctors signed a settlement, or compromise, agreement with their trust. We were given 64 heavily redacted contracts to review. Of those 55 - that is nearly 90 per cent - contained gagging clauses.
…
Under another FOI we asked all 225 hospital trusts in England how much they had spent on settlement agreements over the past decade. Of those who responded, only 71 trusts admitted to entering into these agreements, 40 revealed they had spent a total of £3m. In one case, a doctor was paid a quarter of a million pounds. However, a further 31 trusts simply refused to tell us how much they had paid out.
While not every settlement was designed to muzzle a whistle-blower, a significant portion were, Macdonald found. The effort has created what she found was a “culture of fear,” yet there are no plans to revise the relevant laws.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, by the way, is a new not-for-profit with a £2 million ($3.2 million) grant to support long-term investigations at British newspapers.
FOI request for H1N1 documents still pending
Filed under: Health journalism, Public health, Public records
Eleven months after she filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for documents related to H1N1, CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson reports that she has finally received a response from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
It states that it has a certain document responsive to my FOI request. The letter says HHS will try really hard to provide the document soon, but that the folks there are very busy so it may take awhile. It says that if I want expedited processing - something I had already applied for a year ago - I should let them know. A phone number was provided in case I had any questions.
Of course the investigative report I was working on is long over, as the bureaucrats must have known it would be by now.
Attkisson says she called the number provided in the letter and left a message several weeks ago and has yet to hear back. Her initial request was prompted by the CDC’s decision to stop testing and tracking H1N1, something her sources told her was hasty and more about influencing the public’s perception of the illness than it was about public health.
Earlier: Freedom of Information: Stalled at CDC and D.C. Government (Oct. 27, 2009)
Related
- Health journalists cite uneven disclosure of H1N1 deaths across country
- AHCJ calls on new administration to improve access to federal experts
Outpatient inspections show serious lapses
Filed under: Health data, Health journalism, Hospitals, Hot Health Headline, Public records, Studies
AP medical reporter and AHCJ board member Carla K. Johnson used FOIA requests to uncover a wealth of infection-control violations at outpatient clinics in Illinois. The majority of Illinois ambulatory centers have yet to be inspected under the tough new rules, but 76 percent of those which have been inspected also have been cited. The inspections are part of a national push to increase the oversight of ambulatory care centers.
Previously, inspectors from the Illinois Department of Public Health visited the centers about every seven years. But the state last year began more vigorous and frequent inspections of outpatient surgery centers, following directives from national health officials. The state now plans to inspect a third of Illinois centers each year, said Karen Senger, a supervisor in the Health Department’s Division of Health Care Facilities and Programs.
The crackdown resulted from a hepatitis C outbreak in Las Vegas believed to be caused by unsafe injection practices at two now-closed clinics.
Johnson’s state request turned up a laundry list of specific violations, all of which she summarized in one nifty sentence: “The five-second rule appears to be alive and well in Illinois same-day surgery centers, where medical staff were observed picking up items that had fallen to the floor and behaving as if they weren’t contaminated by germs,” Johnson wrote. In an e-mail to Covering Health, Johnson said her story should be easy to localize and explained just how she obtained the inspection reports and why they are now available.
I FOIA’d state inspection reports (CMS-2567s) for ambulatory surgery centers in Illinois that were cited for deficiencies in infection control during the past 12 months. States have been directed by HHS to use a new audit tool to look for infection control problems, following an outbreak linked to two centers in Las Vegas.
‘Gold mine’ of workplace toxicity data released
Filed under: Health data, Hot Health Headline, Public health, Public records
After a long FOIA battle that ended with a federal lawsuit, Adam Finkel, former OSHA director of health standards programs for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (bio and contact information), has “acquired data on some three million samples, taken at about 75,000 locations from 1979 to 2009,” the Center for Public Integrity reports as part of its “Data Mine” series.
The air and “wipe” samples in question were taken to determine workplace exposure to toxic substances. Finkel plans to analyze this data “gold mine” and make it available to the public in an easily digestible format (a project for which he has already secured grant money). At some point, OSHA itself may do the same.
Asked if OSHA plans to make the sampling data public, agency spokeswoman Diana Petterson responded in an e-mail that “it is under consideration and must address certain concerns including the data integrity and the completeness of the data.” Finkel, who left OSHA after accusing the agency of failing to test its own inspectors for dangerous levels of beryllium, is skeptical. “They made it as hard as they possibly could,” he said. “This database is up to 30 years old, and they’ve shown no interest in making it accessible or doing anything useful with it internally.”
The Data Mine series, a collaboration between The Center for Public Integrity and the Sunlight Foundation, will highlight inaccessible or poorly presented information from the federal government.
From the CIA to the CDC, we’ll be looking at data that needs to be public, with regular posts on the Center’s and Sunlight’s websites. We’ll describe each data set, as well as officials’ plans for putting it online – or not.
Groups give Obama “A” for openness despite barriers between journalists, federal experts
Filed under: Government, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline, Public records
A coalition of reform groups, including Common Cause, Democracy 21, the League of Women Voters and U.S. PIRG, recently issued “A Report Card from Reform Groups on the Obama Administration’s Executive Branch Lobbying, Ethics and Transparency Reforms in 2009.” The administration gets high marks in a number of categories, including an “A” for open government. The report card, however, seems to overlook an issue of particular interest to health care journalists.
The groups praise the administration’s “unprecedented steps to implement Executive Branch transparency,” steps they said include the disclosure of official visits to the White House, the publication of stimulus and other government contracts online and the administration’s “presumption of disclosure” approach to FOIA requests. They also note a few shortcomings, including the administration’s reliance on Internet-only avenues of disclosure and time lags in the availability of some information.
According to AHCJ’s Right to Know Committee, there’s another shortcoming those reformers missed in their report card: Restricted access to federal employees. AHCJ has already requested that the administration reverse inherited policies that allow federal public information officers to restrict the access the public has to federal experts, and while committee representatives praised the administration’s move toward a more open government, they don’t think this particular obstructionist policy should be ignored.
By way of explanation, here’s an excerpt from a letter sent by Right to Known Committee Chair Felice Freyer and AHCJ President Charles Ornstein to the groups responsible for the report card.
… we wanted to make you aware of another issue the administration has yet to address: the continuing difficulty that journalists face in speaking with federal employees. Under policies that have intensified over the past 15 years, public information officers often block or delay our access to the people who have the facts needed to inform the public.
This is not just a matter of reporters looking to make their jobs easier. It’s a question of our ability to tell the public what federal employees are doing with taxpayers’ money and to report on important research and public health issues. Many times staff members are eager to talk with us, but they require permission from public information officers. The PIOs sometimes simply say “no.” Or they never call back. Or they tell the reporter to wait for the official news release. Many insist on listening in on interviews, ensuring that staff will stick to the “official story.”
HHS releases FOIA report in less-than-ideal format
Bob Garfield of WNYC’s “On the Media” talked to John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation, about last week’s announcement of the Open Government Directive.
Wonderlich says the initiative “is the administration making a real commitment to systemic change within the government.” He also brings up the issue of how information will be made available, pointing out that spreadsheets and datasets are more valuable than paper records to journalists as well as other businesses.
He points out that government agencies report each year on how well they are responding to Freedom of Information Act requests and says that last week – for the first time – the Department of Justice released that information for 2008 in spreadsheets.
Unfortunately that’s not quite the case. The reports from most nearly all of the departments are in spreadsheet form but a few, including the report from the Department of Health and Human Services, are in other formats that may be more difficult to analyze.
There is, however, a bit of good news. The 2007 report from HHS showed that there were more than 28,000 pending requests. The agency has made an effort to reduce its backlog and the 2008 tally is just more than 19,000.
Sunshine Week may drop employee, fundraising
Filed under: Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
Clint Hendler reports in the Columbia Journalism Review that Sunshine Week’s only full-time coordinator will likely lose her job soon.
Photo by **Mary** via Flickr
The media-sponsored weeklong push for open government will be put together on a part-time basis by an employee at the American Society of News Editors. Sponsors hope the event has gained enough momentum to keep going with less intensive planning and organization and more reliance upon volunteer efforts.
The Knight Foundation grants that kept the event going since its 2005 inception have run their course, and a major fundraising push raised only $471,600 of a planned $2.5 million towards a permanent endowment. The Knight Foundation will match any funds raised. According to Hendler, the disappointing totals have led ASNE to pull resources out of fundraising efforts and instead devote them to keeping Sunshine Week going.
CDC refuses to hand over 4,000 pages to paper
Filed under: Health journalism, Hot Health Headline, Public records
In January, 2007, AHCJ member and Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Alison Young asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 4,000 pages of documents, all discussing the threats to the agency’s reputation posed by her work and that of her co-workers.
Photo by Marcin Wichary via Flickr
The CDC says it takes an average of 38 days to process Freedom of Information Act requests, yet the Atlanta paper has several requests still pending after a year or two. In a recent column, Young takes the tardy agency to task, citing President Obama’s request for openness.
In the AJC’s case, the CDC said it fears publishing the records “would interfere with the agency’s deliberative process and have a chilling effect on employee discussions.” The records are being withheld under an FOIA exemption for internal documents that are part of the agency’s deliberative process.
FDA relied on industry during BPA approval
Susanne Rust and Meg Kissinger of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel used the federal Freedom of Information Act to obtain and review dozens of government e-mails and more than 100 attached files to find that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration actively leaned on BPA industry lobbyists “to do much of their work for them” during the approval process for bisphenol A.
The reporters say that “BPA, used to make hard, clear plastic common in many food product containers, is found in the urine of 93% of Americans. It has been linked to neurological defects, diabetes, breast and prostate cancer and heart disease.”
The FDA worked to discredit a Japanese study that linked BPA to miscarriages by going to a lobbyist - before the government’s scientists even had a chance to review the study. And both studies the FDA relied upon to approve BPA were funded by chemical makers.
At the same time, the reporters found, independent BPA experts had not been given the same level of access to the FDA and in fact had found it difficult to even get their opinions heard during the process.
The e-mails Rust and Kissinger obtained appear to paint a pretty detailed picture of the cozy relationship between BPA lobbyists and FDA officials, citing numerous examples of privileged access granted to industry representatives and instances in which the government officials appeared to defer to their opinions and judgments.
New FOIA guidelines encourage transparency
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder issued a memorandum (PDF) that directs all executive branch departments and agencies to apply a presumption of openness when administering the Freedom of Information Act.
The guidelines state that “an agency should not withhold information simply because it may do so legally” and that when “an agency determines that it cannot make full disclosure of a requested record, it must consider whether it can make partial disclosure.” Holder emphasizes that everyone in the federal government is responsible for effective FOIA administration, not just an agency’s FOIA staff.
The memo addresses online records and data as well: “Accordingly, agencies should readily and systematically post information online in advance of any public request. Providing more information online reduces the need for individualized requests and may help reduce existing backlogs.”
The memo specifically “rescinds the guidelines issued on Oct. 12, 2001, by former Attorney General John Ashcroft.”
Related
-
Join us in Omaha to find untold rural health stories
New at HealthJournalism.org
- AHCJ offers financial data about nonprofit hospitals
- Diversity in aging: Putting gray in the rainbow
- Southeast journalists eligible for regional fellowship program
- AHCJ-NLM Health Journalism Fellowship offers hands-on medical research training
- AHCJ announces 2011 winners of top health journalism awards
