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April 24, 2006
Missing voices
“Concord Hospital declined to make any primary care physicians in hospital-owned practices available for this story.”
Maybe you noticed this sentence near the top of Anne Ruderman’s story in the Sunday Monitor on patients’ increasing use of the internet to research their own medical problems. It is hard for us to know how readers react to such a statement, so I thought I’d provide a little background.
It is unusual for us to include a statement of this nature in a story that is essentially a consumer-oriented news feature. More often, you’ll see us saying we could not reach a person for a story when a reader would expect to hear from that person – a public official criticized for a position she took, for example.
Some months ago, we determined as part of our content-driven redesign project that one subject on which we needed to improve our coverage was health care. We created a medical beat and assigned Ruderman to it.
Obviously, the most important institution on this beat is Concord Hospital. This is especially true because many formerly private medical practices in Concord are now owned by the hospital, and their doctors and other employees are employees of the hospital.
But Concord Hospital forbids its doctors to talk with Ruderman or other reporters unless the reporter first goes through the hospital PR office. And the PR office generally does not respond in a timely manner to requests for interviews with doctors.
Doctors are busy people. They need to spend as much time as possible with patients. But a call from a professional reporter takes little time. Ruderman isn’t looking to pester the doctors she calls. She just wants to tap into their expertise, and she’s proficient at doing so.
It is also an important duty of Concord’s biggest medical institution to help inform the public, through stories in the Monitor, about health issues. Certainly we would rather quote Concord physicians on these issues than physicians outside of Concord, many of whom Ruderman can easily reach.
The story on patient use of the internet as a source for medical information is a case in point. Every primary-care physician has dealt with this issue in recent times. A big part of Ruderman’s job in the story was to give examples, positive and negative, of doctors’ experience with this phenomenon. Quoting more local doctors – and Ruderman did quote a few, including one ICU doctor she contacted through the hospital PR office – would have made the story more relevant to readers throughout the Monitor’s circulation area. The hospital did not make one of its 63 primary-care physicians available to her.
This was not a deadline story. Ruderman made her first contact with the hospital’s PR office on April 10 and made several subsequent attempts to reach primary-care physicians through the hospital. The story did not appear until 13 days after that initial contact.
In the end no interviews were set up. We thought readers might wonder why no Concord primary-care physicians were quoted in the story. That’s why we included the sentence saying the hospital had declined to make this happen.
Posted by Mike Pride at April 24, 2006 06:59 PM
Comments
Mike, I am disappointed that you, of all people, would not check your facts before you wrote such a scathing commentary about Concord Hospital's Public Affairs Office. The facts follow:
* The Hospital did not decline to make a primary care physician available; in fact, Dr. Carl Ciak was waiting for Anne Rudderman's call at 5:30 one evening - just ask him.
* We cannot and do not "forbid" our physicians to talk to reporters; however,it is policy that
media requests be made to the Public Affairs Office - this policy mirrors virtually every other hospital policy in New Hampshire - just check it out.
* The Public Affairs Office does respond immediately to media requests by calling and emailing physician practices to request support. Still,we cannot make our doctors - even those we employ - respond to media requests, especially when, at times, some have relayed to us their view that those requests are frivolous and not important to the health concerns of their patients and our community overall. Add to that the fact that many are concerned about how they may be portrayed in the media and you may understand the challenges of providing a "doc a day" to respond to your inquiries.
* The Hospital takes its responsibility about informing the public about health issues very seriously; we will probably always disagree about what those issues are and thus - the delta between what we pitch and what you choose to write about.
* The Public Affairs Office receives positive feedback regularly from other media outlets regarding our helpfulness and our efforts to work with them - feel free to call the Union Leader, WKXL, NH Public Radio and WMUR to see what they think.
I came over to the Monitor last week to meet with a number of editors and reporters with the hope of bridging the gap between the perception and the reality. I came away with some ideas of how we might make things better...but to be truthful, after Anne's article with the totally inaccurate statement and your follow-up commentary, I'm thinking, "would it make a difference?"
Posted by: Pam Puleo at April 26, 2006 05:10 PM