Sean Hamill

Reporter

Sean D. Hamill is a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who covers health care issues in the region, including a series last year about about the Pittsburgh region's largest hospital group, the non-profit UPMC, exploring how it became the region's richest landowner using tactics typically associated with for-profit hospitals. The series won the state's AP Managing Editor's Enterprise Reporting category for 2012. More recently, Sean has been investigating what went wrong at the Pittsburgh Veterans' Affairs' hospital that led to a Legionnaires' outbreak that caused at least five deaths in 2011 and 2012. His work helped spur a Congressional hearing earlier this year on the outbreak. Sean grew up in a Pittsburgh suburb, Sewickley, along the Ohio River, the town where he returned eight years ago, after being away for 18 years attending the University of Missouri-Columbia (BJ) and Northwestern University (MJ). Between those two schools, he worked, first, for The Fulton Sun in Fulton, Mo., before working for three daily papers in Chicago after graduate school: The Daily Southtown, The Daily Herald, and, finally, the Chicago Tribune. Following the Tribune, he freelanced for three years, before he and his wife, veterinarian Joey Kallem, had their first son, Declan, now 8, and moved back to Sewickley. After taking a temporary job at the AP for six months, Sean went back to freelance, working primarily for the New York Times for four years before the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette hired him. He and his wife also have a 5-year-old son, Tadhg, three dogs, three cats, two birds and one elderly bearded dragon lizard.

Articles

Clifford Schmidt, 71, talks with Monongahela Valley Hospital nurse Deborah Holman during a scheduled home visit in Mon Valley.

Program to lower readmissions improves patient care, saves money

A pilot program in Pittsburgh, Penn. that uses nurses and pharmacists to follow-up with patients after they leave the hospital has significantly lowered readmission rates, improved the health of thousands, and saved $41 million at six hospitals in its first two years alone.

Braddock Mayor John Fetterman stands near the former site of the borough's sole hospital.

Chapter 1: Poor Health: A frayed safety net

More than a quarter of the hospitals in the Pittsburgh area have closed since 2000, drastically reducing the amount of charitable care available to the poor. Where are they getting care?

Lake Fong/Post-Gazette

Access to specialists out of reach for many in Pittsburgh region

Myrtis Henderson is one of many patients who fall into a yawning gap in the health safety net. Many such patients need specialty care but are unable to get it because they don't have insurance or have inadequate insurance. Specialists won't accept them, or they can't pay upfront for the visit.

Brownsville General Hospital, closed 2006

Chapter 2: Poor Health: A frayed safety net

Sean D. Hamill wrote this report for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as a 2013 National Health Journalism Fellow and Dennis Hunt Health Journalism Fund grantee. Other stories in the series include can be found here.

Judy Kunes, an LPN and volunteer at the 9th Street Free Clinic in McKeesport, measures the blood pressure of Nathan Hite, a former McKeesport firefighter experiencing shoulder and hip pain, on May 15, 2014.

Despite Affordable Care Act, free clinic still in demand

A free clinic in Pennsylvania was hoping that the Affordable Care Act would lower demand for its services. But there remains a huge need from those who still lack coverage, according to clinic founder Dr. Bill Markle. "We’ll be here for the foreseeable future.”