The health disparities between Johnson and Wyandotte counties in Kansas are real. Reporter Alex Smith explains how he "sought to depict not just the struggles these people faced, but also their humor, their hope, their wisdom."
In Johnson County, for every 1,000 infants born in recent years, fewer than five don’t make it to their first birthday. In Wyandotte County, the number is closer to eight.
At her home studio in Westwood, Kansas, instructor Marilyn Pace leads a class of 5-to-8-year olds through yoga positions. But just six blocks from the yoga studio — where Wyandotte County begins — the picture of health is quite different.
Health rankings published in recent years have made it clear that there’s a lot of work to do in Wyandotte County, Kansas, which has some of the worst health outcomes in the state, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Meaning as medicine, infant formula, Medicare fraud, osteoporosis and more from our Daily Briefing.
Kansas City Star reporter Alan Bavley was just doing his job. In response to his watchdog stories on medical malpractice, federal officials yanked public portions of a national doctor database offline and threatened him with fines. Now, journalists are pushing back.
Alan Bavley at the Kansas City Star found an opening in Missouri state law, drove a truck into it and loaded it up with facts for his story on Kansas and Missouri doctors who had histories of alleged malpractice, yet whose medical board records were spotless.
As 2011 unfolds, I’d like to share some of my favorite health journalism – much but not all of it policy-related – from 2010. This is definitely not a best-of list, but rather journalism that can inspire and teach us.
Here are my first five picks, in no particular order of importance. I’ll share the next five next week.
Happy New Year!
Last week Antidote introduced you to Dr. Steven Balt, the rare physician to have the courage to open up about his personal experiences with the physician discipline system. The first part of our interview was posted last week. The last part is below.
Medicare’s new consumer information site, Physician Compare, promises the same gold mine of data patients find when they use Hospital Compare or Nursing Home Compare. But, unlike those sites, Physician Compare does not keep its promises.
