Sarah Kliff
Vox’s Sarah Kliff, who has an AHCJ Reporting Fellowship on Health Care Performance, is writing a series about fatal, preventable medical errors.
Not the inevitable tragic things that can happen to a patient – but the ones that we know how to avoid, the lives that should not be at risk. Kliff spent several months on one story – actually a story and accompanying video and graphics – that combined insights about how hospitals think central line infections and a gripping narrative about the death of a 3-year-old girl. You can find the story here.
Kliff wrote a “How I did It” essay for AHCJ that addresses a lot of the nuts and bolts of a vast project like this. She outlines how she reached out to patients/families, how she organized the voluminous – initially not searchable – medical records, how she found researchers who could elucidate things she did not fully understand in those records.
And she talks about the power of a good analogy to both organize a 5000-word narrative and give readers an accessible entry point to her work. Read about how she did it.