Is there a future for Medicare Locals Ink?
7th Nov 2011 Melissa Sweet all articles by this author
Medical Observer
Medicare Locals, after some years of painful growing pains, have found their footing.
They have established systems to ensure a timely understanding of the wide range of factors affecting the health of their local populations, and they are working with a range of interests, including health services, to help address these. Some have also taken a step that many perceived as high-risk: employing journalists.
The journalists are not churning out the dull, worthy and generally unread reports, nor are they writing press releases and other marketing material. Rather, they are investigating and telling authentic, sometimes confronting stories about their local communities, taking a broad view of the factors affecting health. These include stories about education, employment, local environmental issues, resource allocation and efforts to make local sense of the tide of data that is being released under Gov2.0 initiatives.
The journalists are helping to inform and engage their audiences as well as to provide a forum for debate and discussion between the community, health services and other sectors.
Their work is also helping to join up the dots in a health system that still struggles with the impact of policy and service silos and fragmentation.
Of course, this may all sound like a desperate job creation scheme from a journalist who is painfully aware of her industry’s uncertain future. But I’m not suggesting that only professional journalists have a role at Medicare Locals Ink.
Enlightened Medicare Locals have recognised the role that citizen journalism can play as a population health intervention in its own right. These innovators were inspired by public health-building projects in Australia and other places that equipped community members with the skills to harness the digital revolution in the investigation and telling of stories.
Indeed, one such recent project, NT Mojos, was funded by the Australian government and gave Indigenous people from remote NT communities the skills and technology to tell their stories using iPhones. You can see some of these stories at http://ntmojos.indigenous.gov.au/.
Some Medicare Locals also took the plunge into publishing, having realised they had plenty to learn about public health communications and engagement from the corporate sector.
When McDonald’s launched its own TV channel for customers (as was recently announced in the US), many public health observers were alarmed by the implications. But others saw it as a lesson that in this era of do-it-yourself publishing, there are new opportunities for those with an interest in contributing to a more informed and useful debate about health matters.
As was recently observed by Dr Ivan Oransky, the executive editor of Reuters Health and founder of the blogs Retraction Watch and Embargo Watch, “a better informed public is a healthier public”.
Of course, there are any number of pitfalls between the idea and the execution of Medicare Locals Ink.
To make a difference, Medicare Locals would need to be publishing journalism (perhaps in collaboration with other like-minded organisations) that rocks the boat, challenges the status quo, and seeks accountability.
As Dr Oransky also noted, “in journalism, you’re not there to make friends with your sources, you’re there for your readers”. (His comments were reported in a recent interview with Other Doctors, a new US blog featuring “doctors who ventured outside the hospital”).
Clearly, Medicare Locals Ink would face some rather daunting barriers, especially as the health sector’s approach to communications has often been driven by a debate-suppressing, risk-management focus.
But it may prove to be timely that primary healthcare reform is evolving at a time of innovation and risk-taking in new media more widely.
Melissa Sweet
Freelance health journalist and editor of Crikey’s health blog, Croakey
7th Nov 2011
4:13pm
Medicare Locals are not filling this research funding gap
Medicare Locals INQ (INQuiry = research) would be fabulous for the hundreds of GP and allied health care professionals involved in this long term research base (proven in Canada and USA) which has been discontinued for no given reason and with no substitute.
We are keen in Australia and have nowhere to go. All GP research depts at all Australian universities are united in working for this.
Dr Manda GP Sydney