'The sickening truth about health journalism'

Everyone likes a good health story. It’s the universal appeal.

Everyone likes their own health, unless ill health itself robs them of that view. Or that of the people they care for. Health matters, and health journalism is huge: almost every outlet will cover some form of health, at some stage. If not the brave victim survival or the miracle cure, stories on health capture the headlines every time there is yet another change to the NHS.

Stories about bad health even more so: who can resist the story about the bungled operation, the management blunder, or the daft denial by the hospital boss?
 
As an NHS PR working in a children’s hospital, I saw the best and worst of health as a story. Sadie Stevens, the girl who made national headlines because she had the ill luck to be hit by a police car. Poppy Guilder, whose treatment for and continuing battle with cancer inspired her parents and many others to raise over £200,000 for research. Emily Bales, whose smile won the hearts of the whole world as she tossed the coin at a Wimbledon final, only to lose her own battle with leukaemia two years later.

There were stories that were just bad from the start. Ryan Senior, the teenager who died after a tragic error in surgery; the Observer front-page lead which lambasted the hospital’s management (the Care Quality Commission reporting "significant progress" in 2010); and people hurting so much I could not begin to imagine their suffering.
 

I think health journalism is threatened. And I think it’s the journalists who can do something about itAlan Taman

Health journalism is so important not just because of its near-universal application.

Nor because of its near-constant ability to make people feel better about people doing good things, or make them furiously determined to stop things being done badly.

It is also important because of the unique consequences of getting it wrong. Exaggerating the dangers can easily put people off seeking the right help, or give them false hope in charlatans and dubious treatments.

Failing to report the dangers at all can have even more drastic effects. I interviewed Shaun Lintern, the reporter who broke the Mid-Staffordshire story, where hundreds of people were found by a public inquiry to have faced "terrible and unnecessary suffering", with a management obsessed by financial targets.

Had Lintern's local paper not allowed him to cover that story, every day for more than a year, the public inquiry would almost certainly not have happened so quickly.

The inquiry could not determine whether "any specific number or proportion of deaths was from an avoidable cause", but many of those families are still aggrieved, that the NHS – our NHS – should have let their relatives down so badly. It will happen again.

It’s the health journalist’s job to capture all this, to tell the story convincingly and in time. But therein lies the shadow. I think health journalism is threatened. And I think it’s the journalists who can do something about it.

There are the undeniable effects of cutbacks in journalism. A lot of  people who have to cover health will not be specialists in it. Reporters are often ‘given health’ with no training, support, or knowledge of the intricacies for even the most apparently simple story.

For example, a child’s planned heart operation is cancelled for the third time at short notice. Angry parents ring the local press. Hospital bungling? Staff shortages? Or is that, in every hospital performing child heart surgery, an intensive care bed has to be available in case things go wrong. And a child got hit by a truck that morning: they’re where they should be, in intensive care.

So it’s really a story about incredibly expensive resources being given to the child whose life is most at risk, and second guessing constantly how many beds to run. Now find all that out in the 30 minutes you’ve got to file…

What’s true for the beleaguered generalist is just as true for the health specialist. The same financial pressures apply but here the effect is to load ‘the health expert’ with more and more to do in less and less time: churnalism looms.

Having the expert knowledge – though a help – will not protect you from the remorseless squeeze.

Or the increasing risks of relying on the press release and your own judgement alone. Risks which are growing for another good reason as well: what is happening to the NHS itself.

Health journalism has unique consequences. As a profession, we need to do all we can to keep it healthyAlan Taman

I can honestly say I never lied to a journalist while working as a PR. Even when not doing so meant I had to tell truth to those in power, in a way that such figures of authority – usually the chief executive – may not have wanted to hear.

That was professional courage, and all good PRs have it. But it’s getting harder. And the pressures acting on health PRs to ‘spin’ the facts a little, obfuscate, even lie, are growing.

Unlike doctors and nurses, health PRs have no ethical framework to support them in saying no.

Yet they should have: the Francis Report called for greater openness and the Care Bill will soon make it a criminal offence for NHS staff to mislead by knowingly using false information about health. 

That could easily place NHS PRs in an impossible position, just as the journalists they are dealing with face uncertainty and risks in their own field.

This ‘perfect storm’ for health journalism has to be avoided. That’s why we started a campaign for health journalism via the National Union of Journalists (NUJ).

So no journalist who has to cover health is left with the sickening feeling they might have gotten it wrong, or missed that all-important clue.

Health journalism has unique consequences. As a profession, we need to do all we can to keep it healthy.

Alan Taman has worked as a freelance health journalist and as a senior press officer in the NHS. He holds an MA in health journalism, researching the ethics of PR in the NHS, and is organising First Do No Harm, a conference on health journalism next month

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