1. Provide the title of your story or series and the names of the journalists involved.
" A Stitch in Time" is a set of two stories for NPR's weekly consumer health segment "In Your Health". These stories were reported by Patti Neighmond and Richard Knox and produced by Jane Greenhalgh.
Audio Entry Part 1
Audio Entry Part 2
2. List date(s) this work was published or aired.
Both stories aired as part of the Health Segment on Monday, December 13, 2010.
3. Provide a brief synopsis of the story or stories, including any significant findings.
Every year about 17,000 US babies are born with a serious heart defect. Over the past two decades, medicine has made tremendous strides in repairing many of these congenital heart problems. NPR is proud to submit "A Stitch in Time," a package of stories that documents striking progress in treating — and even preventing — one of the most severe congenital defects, hypoplastic left heart syndrome, or HLHS. Babies with HLHS are essentially born with only half a heart. NPR's Patti Neighmond profiles one of the longest survivors of HLHS, a 25-year-old woman named Jeni Busta. When she was born, doctors told Busta's mother she could take her baby home to die, wait for an unlikely heart transplant, or undergo a heroic series of operations to rearrange the plumbing of Jeni's heart. In the mid-1980s, only one in 10 babies survived the high-risk surgery, but for Jeni's mother it was the only option. As Neighmond's sensitive portrait shows, Jeni Busta not only survived, but now, 25 years later, she's flourishing. Still, her health is fragile, and she's unable to do many things that others take for granted. Jeni Busta's story is the perfect prologue for Richard Knox's gripping narrative about an experimental but highly successful procedure that actually prevents hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Kim Wells was 23 weeks pregnant when doctors told her there was a problem with her unborn daughter's heart. Two days later, the Iowa woman found herself in a Boston operating room, undergoing an incredibly delicate procedure that's been done on about 200 women. Blending archival audio from that operation with newly gathered narration from one of the doctors, Knox and Science Desk Producer Jane Greenhalgh take listeners into that operating room, where the Boston team opens a stuck valve in the fetus's beating heart — it's only the size of a grape. Today that baby is a healthy, rambunctious four-year-old with a fully functioning heart. These stories were the most-viewed on NPR's highly trafficked web site, and they generated a spirited debate about the expense of treating congenital heart defects. Listener Jacob Naylor wrote: "As I listened on my way to work this morning to the actual audio recording from the surgery, I began to tear up (which I don't really do). I've spent some time and effort complaining about costly health care and insurance&However, NPR&has a knack for connecting the story with a sense of reality that hits home."
4. Explain types of documents, data or Internet resources used. Were FOI or public records act requests required? How did this affect the work?
Sources for fetal heart surgery story were doctors at Children's Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, archival videotape of fetal surgery operations performed there, families involved (the family featured in the piece and others were interviewed), and background material on fetal surgery from the medical literature.
5. Explain types of human sources used.
See above reply
6. Results (if any).
The piece engendered considerable online comment from listeners and web users who were moved by the story and from others who either criticized the cost of doing procedures like this or strongly defended the surgery as preventing more costly care down the road.
7. Follow-up (if any). Have you run a correction or clarification on the report or has anyone come forward to challenge its accuracy? If so, please explain.
There were no corrections in either radio story being submitted for this award.
8. Advice to other journalists planning a similar story or project.
Whenever possible it's highly effective to take readers or listeners into the operating room or the doctor's office or emergency department for a first-hand appreciation of what medicine is all about.