GBO NEWS: New NPR Gen-Beat Reporter; Special AHCJ Conference Report
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations
March 27, 2013 — Volume 13, Number 6
EDITOR’S NOTE: The new GBO News marks the 20th year of the Journalists Network on Generations. Click through this brief table of contents to the full “GBO News,” on WordPress. This format is “scaleable” for computer, e-pad or mobile device, and you can post comments now directly. Let us know what you think of the new format. If you have technical problems receiving issues of GBO News or if you’d like to be removed from the list, simply auto-reply to this e-mail of GBO News, or phone me at 415-503-4170 ext. 133 (e-mail: pkleyman@newamericamedia.org). GBO especially thanks Sandy Close of New America Media, and our cyber-guru, Kevin Chan.
IN THIS ISSUE: Matzo Brei and Bunny Love for All.
1. THE CONFERENCE BEAT: Health Journalism Conference Spotlights Growing Complications of Senior Care
2. RESOURCES: AHCJ’s New Website Provides Investigative Tool on Hospitals
3. GEN BEATLES NEWS: Ina Jaffe is NPR’s Latest Gen Beat Reporter; Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Warren Wolfe Retires after 42 years at paper
4. TOASTS TO POSTINGS: Recent articles by Rose Aguilar (The Nation, older homeless women); Trudy Lieberman (CRJ, greedy-geezer mongering in the social insurance debate); Mike Hoyt (CJR, “Greedy Geezers, Redux”; Charles Ornstein (ProPublica and Washington Post on his Mom’s death and end-of-life care); Lee Goldberg (Roll Call, on long-term care in health reform); Kerry Hannon (New York Times, on the gray-jobs market); Yolanda Gonzalez Gomez (HuffPost Voces/New America Media, series on aging along the Tex-Mex border.)
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1. THE CONFERENCE BEAT
Health Journalism Conference Spotlights Growing Complications of Senior Care
By Eileen Beal
BOSTON–Despite the fact that the Association for Health Care Journalists’ (AHCJ) annual conference was held in bone-chilling Boston during the St. Patrick’s Day weekend, over 750 journalists, writers and authors showed up–about half the organization’s membership. That kind of attendance is a clear indication that those who cover health care are hungry for the kind of knowledge that boosts reporting skills and the networking that only a narrowly focused association, such as AHCJ can provide. Not only does the group include top staff reporters in the country, but it has seen a recent surge in the number of independent journalists.
Hands-down, the most popular session was “When Experts Disagree: The Art of Medical Decision Making.” The he-says/she-says presentation was by best-selling physician authors–and spouses–Pamela Hartzband and Gerome Groopman (also a New Yorker staff writer). They based the presentation on their 2011 book, Your Medical Mind: How to decide what is right for you.
The couple focused on the three (sub-conscious for most of us) prime factors in medical decision making:
*Whether a person (doc or patient) is a minimalist or a maximalist regarding tests and treatments;
*Whether doctor or patient believes in low-tech or natural approaches or high-tech interventions;
*And whether they tend to believe/embrace the latest medical information and research, or lean toward skepticism about all things medical.
Session topics during the three-day conference were all over the healthcare map. [See the program for the full range.) Top-drawing sessions mainly focused on health care reform/policy issues (my favorite: “The Nanny State: Can Government Change our Behavior?”); on Internet-based tools; on skill-building, such as parsing obtuse, often conflicting, medical studies; and on hard-science presentations about the brain/mental health, stem cells, “replacement medicine,” autism, and the care needs of the nation’s aging population.
Inadequate Resources for Aging Population
Which brings me to the session I coordinated on “The Growing Complication of Coordinating Senior Care.” It was packed for two reasons: Health care journos were there to learn more about the needs of their aging readers, and –as the questions put to presenters after the session showed–their aging parents.
Geriatrician Sharon Levine, MD, (salevine@bu.edu), who heads up the Geriatric Medicine Fellowship Program at Boston University’s School of Medicine, explained that geriatricians “care for those who need significant coordination of care to maintain function.”
Commenting on the looming shortage of geriatricians, Levine noted, “Despite the fact that several surveys have shown geriatricians are the most satisfied [subspecialists] … way too many geriatric fellowships are going unfilled … because they are also among the lowest paid.”
Social worker Bert Rahl (brahl@benrose.org) of Benjamin Rose, a large nonprofit long-term care provider in Cleveland, followed with an overview of geriatric mental health issues, chronic/long-term conditions and late-onset problems.
Rahl said both kinds of issues are “complicated by comorbid medical illnesses.” Asserting that unmet mental health difficulties cut 20 years off peoples’ lives, he said that the rapidly aging population is challenging the poor current funding levels and inadequate workforce development in United States. For example, Rahl said the outlook for improving, let alone maintaining the currently modest level of mental health services for older adults is especially unpromising.
In her presentation, Boston University’s Terry Ellis (tellis@bu.edu) focused on suddenly disabling strokes and progressively disabling Parkinson’s Disease. She described significant strides made in physical rehabilitation–when done in conjunction with neurorehab.
Also, Ellis discussed her own research showing that the implementation of condition-specific exercises as soon as possible after a stroke or Parkinson’s has been diagnosed allows for a faster and fuller recovery for stroke victims, while also preserving functional ability for those with Parkinson’s.
To address the issue of staying motivated enough to exercise, Ellis introduced those attending the session to “Tanya,” a virtual exercise coach. “We still need to do research, about intensity, dosing, scheduling,” she said, “but it looks like there are real benefits of introducing virtual exercise programs, too.”
The clean-up batter for the session was AARP’s Public Policy Institute director, Susan Reinhard (sreinhard@aarp.org) speaking about the lynch-pin role caregivers (family, friends, neighbors, etc.) play in care and treatment of older adults and the caregiver stress – burn-out, even – they are experiencing.
Focusing on AARP’s recently published Home Alone: Family Caregivers Providing Complex Chronic Care, Reinhard listed tasks caregivers are doing, such as managing medications, wound and incontinence care, coordinating care from various physicians, preparing special diets, operating highly complex medical equipment. The study, she said, shows caregivers are worried they might harm or kill someone and are frustrated that there aren’t more services and options for help.
Reinhard stressed the important role government policy makers and health care professionals must play to reassess, restructure and realign the way supports and resources are provided to and for caregivers. She emphasized the need to vastly improve the kind and amount of training provided to family caregivers.
“Many caregivers today,” Reinhard said, “are providing care that, when I first started out in nursing scared me. And I had a nursing degree.”
Eileen Beal is a Cleveland-based health care journalist and occasional contributor to GBO News.
2. RESOURCES
AHCJ’s New Website Provides Investigative Tool on Hospitals
Also, AHCJ announced its new website, www.hospitalinspections.org, at the Boston conference. It’s a free, searchable news application that compiles thousands of federal inspection reports for hospitals around the nation since January 2011. Reporters or others will find that the site includes detailed reports of hospital violations dating to January 2011, searchable by city, state, name of the hospital and key word.
The organization’s release notes that creation of the online investigative tool “follows years of advocacy by AHCJ urging the government to release the deficiency reports in an electronic format. Until now, reporters and the public had to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to obtain the documents, a process fraught with delays that can stymie timely public knowledge of problems at hospitals.”
It continues, “AHCJ’s board of directors praised CMS for making the information available and working collaboratively with AHCJ to bring greater transparency to this important information. “Being able to easily review the performance of your local hospital is vital for health care journalists and for the public,” said AHCJ President Charles Ornstein, a senior reporter at ProPublica in New York.
Also, AHCJ sent a letter urging The Joint Commission, the largest private accreditor of hospitals, to likewise make public information from its inspections of hospitals. The Joint Commission does complaint-generated and routine inspections separately from CMS, but as a private agency it is not subject to FOIA. As a result, thousands of hospital inspection reports still remain under wraps. The commission has rejected two previous AHCJ requests for this information, saying disclosure would compromise its efforts to improve hospital quality.
“The AHCJ board cannot accept the notion that patients are best protected by keeping hospital problems secret,” Ornstein wrote to commission president Mark Chassin. “Such reasoning also flies in the face of growing consensus among health care leaders and policy makers about the importance of transparency to improve medical care quality.”
3. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** NPR’S Ina Jaffe Latest Reporter Working on Aging – Your might have heard some of the five-part “Working Late” series on NPR’s “Morning Edition” in February and March. The stories profile older adults still in the workforce, such as Wisconsin State Sen. Fred Risser, 85; Colorado nurse-midwife, Dian Sparling, 71; and Washington, D.C.-area librarian Janet Sims-Wood, 67, an African American-history specialist, who loves helping students navigate through college applications.
The series is the first major project by NPR veteran Ina Jaffe on her latest assignment as the network’s new generations-beat reporter. But the award-winning reporter told GBO in an e-mail exchange that she was less than enthusiastic at first. “I was encouraged to apply for the position. I hesitated and wondered if I would find the beat depressing. But after living with the idea for a few days, I had a complete change of heart. The possibilities for great topics, for variety and for relevance was thrilling.”
Long based at NPR West, in Culver City (the real Hollywood, where The Wizard of Oz was shot), Jaffe’s bio lists numerous honors, most recently a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media. Others were bestowed by Investigative Reporters and Editors and the American Bar Association, for her 2012 series on rising violence in California State Psychiatric Hospitals.
As a political reporter, Jaffe has covered regional and national elections and related issues, such as the emergence of minority political power in California. Before heading West, the Chicago native was the first editor of Weekend Edition Saturday with Scott Simon. (While there, Jaffe shared a 1988 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for the report “A State of Emergency,” about racial conflict in Philadelphia.)
Jaffe, first appointed to the age beat last summer, said that while the “Working Late” series concluded with the March 14 segment, “we’re hoping to keep Working Late as an occasional series, following up on some ideas we didn’t get to this time as well as some stories that listeners have sent us.” The proportion of older workers on the job is rising, and currently, according to her reports, almost a third of Americans 65-70 are still working. (For those 75 and older, 7 percent are still at it.)
On other topics, Jaffe has done one story related to Alzheimer’s with more in the planning stage, as well as finance-related pieces. At the moment, she said, “ I’m working on a fashion story.”
Jaffe, who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy, said that since taking on the new assignment she’s been inspired by the especially personal responses people have to the subject. “I haven’t mentioned my new beat to a single person who doesn’t think it’s about him/her or their parents,” she said.
***Happy Trails to Warren Wolfe, whose last official day as age-beat reporters for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune is this Good Friday. Wolfe, a founder of GBO’s parent group, the Journalists Network on Generations 20 years ago, has been conclaving with his wife and partner Sheryl Fairbanks in their own “personal pre-retirement/financial/lifestyle workshop.”
More writing on aging, sometimes for GBO, is in the offing. He was at the paper, locally contracted as the “Strib” for 42 years. (Although it was in that era that the melded from the morning Tribune and PM Star.) Just so you know Wolfe wasn’t frozen in place all that time, he actually started 4.5 years earlier at southern Minnesota’s Red Wing Republican Eagle. (Anyone remember Red Wing Shoes?)
Wolfe noted, “I wrote about aging issues for 20 years — started as a copy editor for a couple years, then a roving feature writer, then covered agriculture and was an assistant city editor for 10 years before starting the aging beat. For the past six months I was covering health and wellness for the features section.” On the age beat, Wolfe has written extensively about caregiving, nursing homes, Medicare, Medicaid, and state and national policies on health care and aging”—and won just about every award one can covering generational issues.
For his encore, he e-mailed, “I plan to do some freelance work for the Star Tribune — perhaps including a series on preparing for retirement — but under IRS rules will wait for a quarter before I do that.” (If you don’t cover retirement finance, you might not know that the IRS does not allow former employees to jump back in immediately on a freelance or contract basis without a waiting period. That’s mainly to discourage employers from pushing long-time workers into doing the same work at lower pay and with no benefits.)
Wolfe added, “I plan to start blogging on aging, caregiving and retirement stuff, perhaps geared mainly to Minnesotans.” The Strib, he said, is interested in hosting it, and local AARP folks say they’ll promote it.
Wisely taking it slow at first, he wrote, “I’ve given myself the next three months to talk to people and get a better idea of how much time I want to devote to journalism and what tools I want to use. Sheryl and I still facilitate a support group for adult children who are caregivers for people with dementia (under the Alzheimer’s Association auspices), and we may stick with that for another year. And we want to do some traveling.
GBO wishes him an especially good Friday this week. For your address book’s Age Beat Ace section, his new contact is Warren.wolfe11@gmail.com.
4. TOASTS TO POSTINGS: Hot Article Links
*** “Old, Female and Homeless,” by Rose Aguilar, ran in The Nation (Feb. 11), with support of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (which you might want to know exists). Aguilar profiled women on the streets of San Francisco. The “Who knew?’ here is that in the Bay Area she’s best known as the host of the daily call-in news interview program, “Your Call,” on KALW public radio. (Listen online.) She’s also an op-ed contributor to Al Jazeera English. Kudos to her also for doing a splendid job earlier this month hosting the James Madison Freedom of Information Awards ceremony held annually by the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California Chapter.
*** “The Enduring Myth of the Greedy Geezer,” by Trudy Lieberman, appeared on her March 14, Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) blog with the subhead, “The press too easily accepts the young vs. old frame on the Social Security debate.” She begins: “A meme that has been bubbling up in the media for months goes something like this: The elderly have it too good. They claim too much of the country’s financial resources and will eat their children’s—and grandchildren’s—breakfast, lunch, and dinner unless Social Security and Medicare are cut. The country can no longer afford to give seniors so much . . . . As a result, for the most part, the press has been presenting a one-sided picture of the Social Security situation, quite possibly to the detriment of young and the old alike.”
*** “Greedy Geezers, Redux” is a March 21 follow-up blog by CJR Editor Mike Hoyt, noting that Lieberman’s piece elicited an invitation for her to expand on the piece in a podcast interview with Carey Goldberg, a veteran healthcare reporter for Boston’s WBUR, on its CommonHealth blog. (Busy Trudy also appeared on Aguilar’s “Your Call,” March 8.)
*** “How Mom’s Death Changed My Thinking About End-of-Life Care,” by Charles Ornstein (charles.ornstein@propublica.org), board president of AHCJ, appeared both in ProPublica, where he is senior health reporter, and the Washington Post. What inspired this personal story, he wrote, was that “For years, I have felt that if we, as a society, could make smarter decisions at the end of life, we could save a whole lot of money. But having watched my mom in her last week of life, I realize just how difficult it is to make such decisions–given the uncertainty of medicine, the fallibility of doctors and the imprecision of our advance directives. If I, as a veteran health reporter, struggled as much as I did, I wanted to share insights and encourage others to do the same.”
*** “Time to Help States Make Lemonade on Issue of Long-Term Care?” by Lee Goldberg, Roll Call, Feb. 4, is subheaded, “The nation has no viable strategy to help people finance their long-term care.” Goldberg, vice president for health policy at the National Academy of Social Insurance in Washington, D.C., wrote,”The enactment of the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 averted the so-called fiscal cliff, but it also repealed the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act that was intended to create a public mechanism to help people pay for long-term services and supports if they become disabled.” He can be an excellent source on long-term care and related policy issues. Contact him at (202) 243-7288, or e-mail: lgoldberg@nasi.org.
“A Gray Jobs Market for All Ages,” by Kerry Hannon ran in the New York Times’ March 19 special section on “Continuing Education.” Hannon, who usually blogs on retirement issues for Forbes and AARP, focused on four encore career areas and training or certification for them: home modification (retrofitting homes for safety and convenience of elders); move managers (for seniors moving out of long-time dwellings); patient advocates (to represent patients in the health care system); and fitness trainers (before you get up and go has got up and went). Hannon’s most recent book, AARP’s Great Jobs for Everyone 50+ (John Wiley & Sons, 2012), is filled with thee and other examples, many of which may suggest retirement story angles for reporters. (Full disclosure, GBO’s editor provided blurb for the book).
*** SERIES: Part 1, “Aging Between Two Worlds — Hispanic, Old and Poor on the Texas Border,” by Yolanda Gonzalez Gomez ran both on Huffington Posts’s Spanish-language HuffPost Voces and in English and en Español on New America Media. Part 1 showed how being old and Hispanic along the Texas-Mexico border presents challenges of high levels of poverty and chronic illness. But some still manage to live a rich life. Also, en Español.
Part 2 — “Aging Between Two Worlds: Hispanic Elders Thrive on Faith, Optimism, Tradition,” describes how despite lives of poverty and struggle, Texas’ Latino elders stay positive and thrive. But the U.S. can’t long sustain its divide into two Americas, rich and poor. She wrote the series supported by the MetLife Foundation Journalists in Aging Fellows program, collaboration between NAM and the Geontological Society of America.
The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), founded in 1993, publishes Generations Beat Online with in-kind support from New America Media (NAM). JNG provides information and networking opportunities for journalists covering generational issues, but not those representing services, products or lobbying agendas. NAM is an online, nonprofit news service reaching 3,000 ethnic media outlets in the United States. GBO readers are invited to visit the NAM website, and click on the Ethnic Elders section logo on the right side. Opinions expressed in GBO do not represent those of NAM. Copyright 2013, JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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