Well, afterwards Akanksha revisited the subject, "partly in response to your blog and partly just to voice some of my perceptions and frustrations with the industry from the vantage point of a healthcare reporter." She offered a number of personal reflections on the Becker's blog. Excerpts:
As a healthcare reporter, I continuously research the industry, speak with healthcare professionals weekly and write about the issues daily, all of which objectively informs my perception.
And the perception I have of the healthcare industry is one wrought with contradiction. Hospital executives, physicians and staff claim their No. 1 priority is the patient. It's upheld as the universal truth. But in this industry, talk seems oh-so-cheap because 440,000 deaths from preventable errors don't relay the message of "safety as a priority." If hospitals and health systems truly hold patient safety as a main concern, there is no excuse for such a figure.
And then she asks the key question:
When will leaders actually make purposeful moves toward addressing these issues and tangibly demonstrate their commitment to the patient?
Time is going quickly, and these safety concerns aren't budging.
And then she concludes:
So where does that leave us?
One of the main pillars of journalism is objectivity in reporting. Journalists are not to involve themselves with the stories they write. I apologize now to the professor of my ethics and communication class, because in this case, I would be remiss to not get involved.
I don't want to include hand hygiene on future lists of patient safety issues. I don't want to include medication errors. I don't want to keep writing about HAIs.
It's a new year, so let's develop a new focus on the most basic tenet of healthcare: caring for the patient. Re-visit my list of the top 10 patient safety issues for 2015 and push those to the top of your resolutions.
And this year, I hope to write a different story — one void of discouraging repetitiveness. We owe that progress to the patients.
Brava to Akanksha. There is a lesson here for all health care journalists: Maintain your objective reporting standards in each story, but be sure that the stories you choose to cover are not restatements of industry pablum or self-serving press releases. Find the drama in the fact that people are unnecessarily being harmed and killed. Document and expose those cases. Probe and explain to the public and the profession what has and has not been done to improve the situation.
Also, when new (often expensive) medical devices and therapies are introduced, ask the question: Do these actually make care better for people? On the AHCJ listserv recently, Norman Bauman noted:
A study in this week's BMJ found that when news stories exaggerated the results of health research, the original press release was usually exaggerated. About a third of the press releases had exaggerations.
They scored the original papers, press releases, and news stories on (1) Advice to readers to change behaviour, (2) causal statements drawn from correlational research, and (3) inference to humans from animal research that went beyond those in the papers.
40% (CI 33% to 46%) of the press releases contained exaggerated advice
33% (26% to 40%) contained exaggerated causal claims
36% (28% to 46%) contained exaggerated inference to humans from animal research.
When press releases contained such exaggeration, 58% (CI 48% to 68%), 81% (70% to 93%), and 86% (77% to 95%) of news stories, respectively, contained similar exaggeration.
They said the responsibility in such cases rested not with the journalist, or the PR office, but with the researchers who let the press release go out with those claims. . . . So the action points are to read the original paper, or at least the abstract and discussion, not just the press release.