Services that mean a world of difference to needy seniors – everything from meals on wheels to specially equipped vans that take older people to doctors’ appointments – are threatened as financially-strapped states take a knife to over-extended budgets.
The California HealthCare Foundation Center for Health Reporting has undertaken one of the most extensive explorations of this trend in a series called Home Alone, a look at the impact of planned cuts to a program that funds California adult day care centers.
The centers provide “transportation, meals, exercise, medication management, physical and occupational therapy, as well as robust social programs” – services that many participants say have “renewed their will to live,” the Center notes on its web site.
The elimination of funding for the centers, set to go into effect on Dec. 1, “endangers some of (the state’s) frailest individuals, people who suffer from multiple disabilities including dementia, incontinence, paralysis and traumatic brain injury,” the Center observes. ”As the centers are forced to close, advocates say, many of these people will be left home alone, vulnerable to abuse and neglect, and at high risk of landing in emergency rooms and nursing homes.”
This would be an important, gripping story in any publication. But the Center for Health Reporting took it to another level by enlisting multiple community media partners to cooperate in reporting and publishing stories on the topic, deepening its impact.
- See the introduction to the project.
- See the entire set of stories.
I asked Richard Kipling, managing editor of the Center, to describe how this project came together and what was involved in making it work. I’m sure you’ll find his responses fascinating – a view of what’s possible when media outlets think outside the box – as I did.
—Judith Graham
NEWS UPDATE:
The state of California reached a legal settlement that will allow adults most at risk of institutionalization to continue to receive services previously provided by adult day health centers. Existing centers will be able to provide services through the end of Feb. 2012. See this write-up of the settlement in California Healthline. Most likely, media attention to this issue played a part in these developments.
By Richard Kipling
At first it seemed pretty improbable.
How could six, seven, eight different ethnic media outlets (some publishing in other languages) work together on one story? What one story would be compelling enough to interest them? And how would all the pieces fit together? That was my mind’s first response when Julian Do, Southern California director of New America Media (NAM), quietly suggested to me at a reception in April that the CHCF Center for Health Reporting could play a big role in coordinating just such an effort. I was intrigued by the prospect, but its looming complexities caused me to just file it away.
Julian knew more about the possibilities than I did. He wears a second hat – director of LA Beez, a unique online collaboration of ethnic media organizations that provide “hyperlocal news content covering the diversity in the Greater Los Angeles area.” So, unknown to me, he had a network already set up.
It took a couple of months for things to get going – our center was hip-deep on several projects – but Julian helped assemble a mid-June face-to-face meeting for the center and six potential project partners, representing several Latino, Asian and African American community news outlets in Southern California. I asked for project ideas, and out of that meeting came no fewer than 14!
It took another two months, more meetings and the addition of several partners to get consensus on one topic.
Gloria Alvarez, managing editor of Eastern Group Publications, a collection of East LA community newspapers, pushed particularly hard for a look at how ethnic communities would suffer disproportionately from the state ending all funding for its Adult Day Health Care program for frail elderly and disabled. This funding cut would force the Dec. 1 closure of many ADHC centers. She said her papers were already initiating coverage of the issue.
There seemed to be agreement around the table that readers would want to know more about how this would affect their various communities.
On Sept. 8, I penned a memo to the group announcing that Jocelyn Wiener would assume the lead reporter role in a project about the future of the state’s Adult Day Health Care program. She would be joined by Lauren Whaley, the center’s multimedia reporter, and me, the project editor. We called a Sept. 20 meeting with the assemblage to become better acquainted with our partners’ various publications and their coverage and ethnic geographies. We asked each one to supply information on the ADHC centers in their areas. Then we launched, dubbing the project “Home Alone” because of its likely effect on program enrollees.
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Bibiana Viernes: Her Center, Her Life from CAhealthReport on Vimeo. |
I still wondered how this was all going to come together. Our center typically works with one partner on a project, and even that is a challenge. But 10 voices at the table? This was something new, and very different.
All of us plunged in, with each partner pursuing, after consultation, its own corner of the ADHC issue. Among the angles pursued:
- Some focused on the impact the closures would visit on the program’s frail, elderly participants, many of whom for years have depended on the centers for their social and cultural lives as well as for critical physical therapy.
- Others looked at how the families of ADHC center participants would cope with the program’s end. For many of these families, the program was their only respite from 24/7 care of their loved ones. Some feared they would have to quit jobs to provide such care.
- Two partners mined the economic implications of the expected closures on employees and the prospect of increased unemployment in their communities.
- And the center’s multimedia reporter, Lauren Whaley, pin-balled from center to center to take the issue’s photographic and audio pulse for three separate audio slideshows (Her Center, Only Two Hands, A Good Model). She also knitted together a photo gallery, combining her own photos with contributions from many of the partners.
What we found in these communities was fear bred of uncertainty – seniors fearing that their lives and friendships were about to be cast adrift; family members pondering how they would survive having to provide 24/7 care for their loved ones; and employees of the centers anxious about how they would find new work in a faltering economy, an economy that had already ravaged these communities.
By the time the project published, we had hurdled several issues, chief among them publication timing and language translation. Determining a publishing date was no easy matter, as the partners had wildly varying publication frequencies. Some went to print several times a week, others once a week and one was a monthly. Some were online only, while others offered print and online.
We settled on this: Partners would publish whenever their schedules allowed over a five-day window beginning Wednesday, Oct. 26. The center, NAM and LA Beez would each publish Jocelyn’s main project article, Lauren’s photo gallery and her audio slideshows on Wednesday, adding in the remaining articles as they were published. In the end, we hoped that each partner would publish as much of the project as possible, and provide links to other partners’ contributions as well.
The translation hurdle had several elements. Some publications were bilingual, so we had to provide translations. Others published only in Mandarin, for example. Again, there was no choice but to provide translations. We even had parts of one article in Tagalog, a primary language of the Philippines. Translations of stories by the partners and the center whipped back and forth, read and re-read, edited and re-edited.
Finally, it meshed.
Almost seven months after an April whispered suggestion, after unmatched cooperation from nine partners (Alhambra Source, Asian Journal, CaribPress, Eastern Group Publications, Impulso, India Journal, LatinoCalifornia, Media Central Inc. and New America Media/LA Beez), after the reporting, writing and editing of 10 separate story elements, after a careful documenting of the issue through photo and audio, the project, led by the center, published. More than 200,000 pairs of Los Angeles-area ethnic community eyes saw stories focusing on people in their communities on an issue that mattered to them. And each of the collaboration’s partners has pledged to keep their own close eyes on this issue and the people affected by its outcome.
Finally, Home Alone had a home.
