Reporting subjects that need particular care
Some health subjects ask more of a reporter than an ordinary story. Climate change and sustainable development have become a central subject of health reporting, and reporting them well turns on understanding the science, conveying the emergency without causing panic, using the terminology newsrooms have standardised and knowing where journalists can train for the work. Writing about safety and disability for the public means advocating safe practices at home and at work, showing the everyday barriers disabled people meet rather than exceptional feats, and explaining why health care workers need protective equipment matched to the risk they face and comfortable enough to be worn. A field whose camps argue over whether its treatments work asks a reporter for a stance that answers both camps, and it brings reader feedback that may judge a piece by the side its arguments favour rather than by the work behind it.
Climate change and sustainable development
Why climate has become a health reporting subject
By 2021, reporting on climate change, environmental health, equity and access to resources had taken centre stage, and one writer expected it to hold that place for the foreseeable future. In the couple of months before December 2021, headlines reported a landmark UN report finding that humans had pushed the climate into unprecedented territory, rain at the summit of Greenland for the first time, and a call to act now for a fast, fair and sustainable COVID-19 recovery.
The Sustainable Development Goals may not always be clear to the general public, and conveying them, the measures and policies that govern them and the citizen's part in achieving them has now fallen on journalists. The independent media are at the centre of sustainable development, because they can create powerful stories, influence government policy, raise public awareness, bring relevant research to the foreground and bring communities together around common goals.
One writer expected in 2021 that over the next few years medical journalists would take a greater role in reporting climatic events around the world and the biological events the climate crisis triggers, and that the innovative sustainable solutions needed would also have to be reported. So a medical writer who is also a journalist has many hats to wear, reporting the crisis responsibly among them.
Understanding the science and conveying it without panic
When knowledge is available at the click of a mouse, it is important that journalists themselves understand the science and report responsibly. Reporting science and creating environmental health stories requires due diligence from the author, and understanding the science behind a story, not sensationalising it and conveying the climate emergency to the audience is a skill in itself. Science reported in scientific journals often uses technical and opaque terms and jargon, which have to be presented clearly and simplified for the audience.
Conveying the climate emergency, its impact on health, the measures being taken and what citizens can do, without causing panic among the audience, is of paramount importance.
Standardised climate terminology
By 2021, with the terminology for reporting science and gender evolving and more inclusive language in use, most print and online magazines recognised that reporting on sustainability and climate change needed standardising across the media. In 2018 the BBC issued a crib sheet on reporting climate change whose most significant item was to accept that climate change is real, so there should be no more debates on whether it was happening. Further guidance followed on the terminology to use, on training journalists on climate change and on reporting these topics sensitively, without causing despair and hopelessness but still getting people to act. By 2021, most global news agencies had issued similar guidance. The Guardian's, for example, included using climate crisis instead of climate change and fish populations instead of fish stocks, changes meant to reflect the crisis and to put the onus on all of us to find solutions.
Training for climate journalists
As of late 2021, the Oxford Climate Journalism Network was a new project of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, created to support journalists interested in covering climate change and to rethink how journalism and the news media approach it. It was open to all working journalists and offered online courses, leadership programmes, journalist fellowships and original academic research. Its first online course was due to start in January 2022, and its about page linked to further resources such as podcast episodes, books and online articles. One writer, addressing readers who are not journalists, holds that the project may expand into other areas in future as climate and health continue to overlap, and that it is always good to know more about climate change and how to communicate its challenges better.
Safety and disability
Accidents at home and at work
Awareness and implementation of safety precautions can reduce preventable accidents. As of 2007, although media campaigns had promoted seat-belt use, fatalities were statistically high among unbelted teenage drivers, and some young people seemed to think it “cool” to drive unbelted. Ageing is a key factor in accidents at home, particularly falls, and in workplaces worker inexperience may contribute to accidents. Writers should emphasise the need for preparedness in homes and workplaces and advocate routine checks for hazards and the development of emergency plans wherever possible.
Disability in everyday life and in emergencies
Writers should emphasise the challenges disabled people face daily, and one practitioner holds that media that call attention to “super feats” do a disservice to the disabled community. Instead of such feats, writers should include the human side of mundane activities such as getting on a bus or trying to visit friends in inaccessible houses. A writer can also develop a roster of experts with disabilities who can speak from experience. Employers should plan for the needs of disabled workers in emergencies by providing such equipment as smoke detectors for people with hearing impairment and available evacuation chairs. Plans for evacuating animals in emergencies should also be considered.
Protective equipment for health care workers
Health care workers need specially designed protective equipment, and the level of protection varies by procedure and potential risk; surgeons, for example, need front and back protective gear. As of 2007, recently developed surgical gowns and isolation apparel protected against microorganisms and newly recognised drug-resistant pathogens such as SARS and avian flu. In selecting protective gear, hospitals and other institutions must strike a balance between the protection and the comfort of workers. Comfort is essential to ensure that the equipment will be used appropriately. Characteristics of comfortable gear include thickness, flexibility and appropriate weight of material. Personal protective equipment should be selected after a careful review that matches manufacturers’ data and industry standards with immediate needs.
A contested field
A stance that answers both camps
One health journalist who by 2008 had reported for more than 18 years had watched alternative medicine move from fringe quackery to academic programmes at major universities, and he sees it as part of the national discussion about faith and reason, with a tension he feels personally. In his reporting he tends to be a scientific sceptic, but he personally believes that there are intangibles in medicine and in life and that not everything that works will be obvious or evident scientifically. When patients tell anecdotes about how a treatment must be effective because it worked for them, and when sceptics say that a treatment must be worthless because its benefits cannot be teased into statistical significance, part of him thinks well, not necessarily. In his view, the serious attention the medical community is giving complementary and alternative medicine benefits both sides.
He describes one of his sources, a physician who directs a university integrative-medicine programme and trained with a Native American healer before becoming a doctor, as walking the line between science and spirituality without feeling that they are mutually exclusive. She holds that no randomised controlled study can prove that she loves her husband, and that some alternative ways of healing lie in a realm of knowledge beyond science, at least at present.
Reader feedback that takes sides
In one freelancer's experience, a medical journalist who writes about controversial subjects for an online news service has to learn to deal with readers' reactions. Quite often there are strong influence groups, such as those who favour traditional medicine and supporters of alternative treatments, so the feedback on an article may not always reflect the labour put into its research and writing, but rather whether its arguments favour one side or the other. His outlet's five-star grading scale has become a source of self-confidence for him, as most readers seem to like the way he reports medical information.