Enhancing health coverage

1. Enhancing health coverage Patricia Thomas Ethnic Media Family Weekend February 23-24, 2008

2. Secrets of the metro dailies • Press releases, alerts, and conferences • Scientific journals • Medical/scientific/policy meetings Pros and cons of each

3. Releases, alerts and conferences • Sign up for email alerts and RSS feeds from official public health newsmakers • “Follow the money” when practitioners and companies push news about health • Press releases and web sites say only what owner wants you to know

4. News from medical journals • Journal articles are “news” – part of ongoing story • Disagreements, contradictory claims are inevitable • Tell readers: no one should ever start or stop treatment based on a single study

5. Big meetings downtown • Doctors love Atlanta, New Orleans and Orlando • Visitors-Convention Bureau calendar • FREE for reporters • Plan ahead – find stories for your community • Thousands of international experts

6. Other important sources • State and local public health agencies • Centers for Disease Control, other federal agencies • Web sites that bring many stories together in one place (see handout)

7. Bring national stories home! • http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/092307/news_20070923075.shtml • http://atlantalatino.com/detail.php?id=7426

8. Best stories are your own! • What do you notice about people and surroundings? • What makes people sick? • What health issues worry family and friends? • What is safe or unsafe in community? • What are barriers to good health care?

9. Look in the briefing book • My favorite websites • What makes a good story about a disease medical condition? • What makes a good story about a test, treatment or procedure?

10. Online Resources for Covering Health and Medical StoriesPatricia Thomas, University of GeorgiaEthnic Media Family WeekendFebruary 23-24, 2008 • Kaiser Family Foundation State Health Facts • http://www.statehealthfacts.org/ • An amazing treasure trove of health information: organized by state, easily searched. Information about physicians, hospitals, emergency room visits, nursing home residents, all available by race and gender and location. Always worth checking whenever you ask yourself, “I wonder how many people fit this description?” or “I wonder how often this happens?” • Kaiser Family Foundation Reports • http://www.kaisernetwork.org • Index page filled with important news items • Daily and weekly reports on HIV/AIDS and health policy • Weekly report on health disparities and minority health • Alliance for Health Reform • www.allhealth.org • This nonprofit, nonpartisan group believes that everyone in the U.S. should have access to health care at a reasonable cost. But they are not affiliated with a particular political party and they don’t advocate for a specific solution to health care problems. Reporters can register at no charge and have access to experts on many topics, in many local areas. Or if you’re in too much of a hurry to register, call 202-789-2300 or email info@allhealth.org and the organization will help you find an expert anyway.

11. Online Resources for Covering Health and Medical StoriesPatricia Thomas, University of GeorgiaEthnic Media Family WeekendFebruary 23-24, 2008 • Health News Review • www.healthnewsreview.org • This website evaluates the accuracy and completeness of news stories about health. If you want to see examples of stories that do everything right and stories that fall short, this is the place to look. There is a checklist for each story explaining its strong and weak points. A project of the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making and the University of Minnesota School of Journalism. • Association of Health Care Journalists • www.healthjournalism.org • It costs $60/year to join AHCJ, but membership benefits include an archive of “how-to” articles and guides on topics such as “covering hospitals” or “covering obesity.” The listserv enables reporters to ask other reporters for help – which is freely given. Someone might need an expert on a particular disease, for example, who is not on the payroll of a drug company. Other reporters offer names of experts they’ve used successfully – and sometimes flag untrustworthy sources. • The organization also provides an email newsletter and organizes annual conferences where veteran, expert journalists and authors share what they know. Participation is a great way to improve your skills and network with colleagues from across the country.

12. Online Resources for Covering Health and Medical StoriesPatricia Thomas, University of GeorgiaEthnic Media Family WeekendFebruary 23-24, 2008 • Pew Hispanic Center • http://pewhispanic.org • The most recent health-related survey on this site appears to be from 2002; given immigration patterns it is dated but still contains information that can help reporters – depending on what you’re writing about. • National Council of La Raza • www.nclr.org • In the topics section, look under “Health and Family Support” for archives of publications and news stories; strong on child health and insurance issues. • US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health • http://www.omhrc.gov • Look under “Data and Statistics” for information about the health of various communities: African American, American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian American/Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latino, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders.

13. Checklist for a solid story about a disease or medical conditionPatricia Thomas, University of GeorgiaEthnic Media Family WeekendFebruary 23-24, 2008 Whether you are writing about hypertension, elbow injury or an outbreak of a new infectious disease, here are important points to cover. • How is the disease/condition/injury defined? What are its signs and symptoms? • Who is most likely to be affected? (Children or older people, men or women, etc.) • What are the risk factors? (Smoking, overweight, working at certain types of jobs, etc.) • How can risk be lowered? (Quitting smoking, losing weight, wearing protective equipment.) • If this is an infectious disease, such as flu, HIV or Chagas disease, how does exposure or transmission occur? (Sexual contact, casual contact, insect bite, etc.) • How do doctors diagnose the problem? (Physical examination, blood or urine tests, etc.) • What treatments are available? (Drugs, surgery, physical therapy, lifestyle change, etc.) • How successful is treatment likely to be? • What happens to people who aren’t treated? Do most people recover spontaneously, or is there significant risk for severe illness or death without medical treatment? • What does treatment typically cost? • Can a local doctor diagnose and treat this problem or should consumers turn to designated hospitals with specialized physicians and facilities?

14. Checklist for a solid story about a disease or medical conditionPatricia Thomas, University of GeorgiaEthnic Media Family WeekendFebruary 23-24, 2008 Reporting and presentation tips: • Lots of basic medical information can be found in online fact sheets created by government agencies (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health) or reputable non-profit organizations (American Cancer Society, Alzheimer’s Association, American Heart Association). • Interviews with experts can help you bring the story home and show why it matters for your audience. • Use charts, drawings, photos, boxes and sidebars to break information into smaller, easy-to-read chunks. Pictures often explain disease processes and surgical treatments better than words.

15. Patricia ThomasKnight Chair in Health and Medical JournalismGrady College of Journalism and Mass CommunicationAthens, GA 30602-3018704-542-1210pthomas@uga.edu Patricia Thomas is the first holder of the Knight Chair in Health and Medical Journalism at Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia. She has written about medicine, public health, and life science research for many years, and from 1991 to early 1997 was editor of the Harvard Health Letter. For her book Big Shot: Passion, Politics, and the Struggle for an AIDS Vaccine (PublicAffairs, September 2001), Thomas won the 1998 Leonard Silk Journalism Fellowship and the 2002 Ralph A. Deterling Award of Distinction from the American Medical Writers Association New England Chapter. Thomas was also one of the first healthy volunteers injected with an experimental HIV vaccine. She has been a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 2002-2003 was the Visiting Scholar at the Knight Center for Science and Medical Journalism at Boston University. During that year, Thomas taught graduate students, wrote a monograph analyzing news management and reporting during the anthrax attacks of 2001, and wrote a chapter for The War on Our Freedoms: Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism. She analyzed how post-9/11 laws such as the Patriot Act affect infectious disease research. Thomas’s work appears regularly in Harvard Magazine, where she is a Contributing Editor. Thomas is an advisor to the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT and the Albert B. Sabin Vaccine Foundation. She also reviews grants for the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program on Breast Cancer, administered by the Department of Defense.