THE
suggestion below may sound unrealistic and more than a little
self-serving. Even so, it might be worth considering this potential
scenario, set sometime in the 2020s.
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
