Keeping health reporting healthy Alan Taman explains why health reporting needs urgent care – and what the union is doing about it
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ou might not hear about the next hospital scandal until well after you should have done. Or when you do, more people will have been put at risk than could have been. One reason is a drop in the number of health specialist reporters, at a time when the NHS is facing massive reorganisation. There is growing concern about the need to keep quality health reporting alive and well. Shaun Lintern broke the Mid Staffs story for the local paper, the Express & Star. Now working for leading health policy weekly Health Service Journal, he recounts how lucky he was: “We had some great editorial leadership around the Mid Staffordshire scandal. It was as a result of that I became health correspondent. The newspaper committed me to go to the Inquiry which was a great source of news.” Shaun spoke with hundreds of local families, hearing how lives were being lost through appalling standards of care. But towards the end of the Inquiry, he noticed a sea-change in newsroom attitude: “After a year or so, there was a pressure on all the reporters, to have to do other things. My editors were starting to say ‘do you really have to go?’. They allowed me to, just, but they were starting to question it. I don’t think my old paper would let someone go now. They haven’t replaced my old position as health correspondent. But can you blame the news editor, who has competing interests to fill the newspaper? Probably not: it’s the same issue everyone’s facing.” A lack of specialised knowledge in health brings its own problems. Even with good general training and perfect instincts, a non-specialist or inexperienced reporter can easily miss things the specialist would spot, or have a nose for: “You can’t just waltz in on day one and understand the system and where to find the stories”, says Shaun, “We need to accept the fact that specialists are specialists, they shouldn’t be expected to dive straight into their specialism and be an expert. It takes time to train and to make the contacts. When I’ve seen other reporters trying to do it on a piecemeal basis
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they struggle. I was able to carve out enough of the day to concentrate on the health service but even then I had the competing pressures of having to do other stories. That’s the fault of newsrooms and editors not having enough staff to do everything. “A well-organised newsroom should be able to make time for specialists, and they should see that as crucial to getting the stories that will help sell their paper. If your specialists are constantly taken away to do other stories then yes, they’re going to cover the opening of the new shop but they’re not going to get you the exclusive that might lead your paper the next day. There’s a trade-off that editors need to realise they’re losing by taking their specialists off their specialism.” With fewer health specialists to help junior reporters, the lack of knowledge – combined with increased pressures to churn out desk-bound stories on virtually anything – can have serious consequences for health reporting, and health. An historic example of the lethal combination of bad reporting on health and bad health provision risked lives in Wales recently: measles amongst young people. The MMR scandal – itself atrocious science – was made much worse by stories at the time which exaggerated the risks, persuading many people not to immunise their then infant children against measles. The consequences didn’t show for a long time, the time it took for the measles virus to reach and spread through an unimmunised population, now teenagers. Bad reporting in health because of a lack of specialised knowledge isn’t confined to history. Shaun is damning of some reports on the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), a way of managing terminally ill patients in hospital. The LCP was found wanting in some cases by a recent inquiry which has recommended its withdrawal, but some reports glossed over the real issue, which was how it was used: “The way that has been reported has been inaccurate. The issue is not the pathway, it’s the implementation and poor practice. That’s what the reporters should have focused on but instead they focused on the pathway itself without asking anybody in the medical profession what it actually is.”
The other side The pressures on health reporting are mirrored in health PR, which has been growing in health organisations and faces its own problems. As a health freelance who worked for over eight years as a senior hospital PR, I saw many changes in management – each time the attitude towards the press would shift depending on how each chief executive regarded the media.