About Pia Christensen

Pia Christensen (@AHCJ_Pia) is the managing editor/online services for AHCJ. She manages the content and development of healthjournalism.org, coordinates AHCJ's social media efforts and edits and manages production of association guides, programs and newsletters.

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Veteran health care journalist Judith Graham will be AHCJ’s topic leader in building new resources for journalists covering aging.

Judith Graham

Graham, who was at the Chicago Tribune for 14 years, will write tip sheets and background briefs, recognize important reporting on the issue, ask other journalists to share their experience on the topic and she will curate lists of resources for journalists.

She will encourage and review suggestions from AHCJ members on what resources they need to cover this increasingly important beat.

We’ve asked Graham to introduce herself:

I’m a long-time journalist who started writing about health care finance and policy in the mid-1980s when this was a new beat, with only a handful of reporters tracking it closely across the country. Over dozens of years, I’ve reported on Medicare, Medicaid, long-term care, chronic care, patient safety, public health, efforts to improve health care quality, end of life care, and the business of health care, among other topics.

Understanding aging is both a personal and professional passion of mine. On the personal front, my mother had multiple sclerosis for 63 years and very early in life, I came to understand how the health care system fails people with long-term chronic illnesses. As a caregiver, I dealt for years with problems that frail, older people experience – finding transportation to medical appointments, uncoordinated medical care, securing reliable home health assistance, debilitating isolation, dealing with insurance hassles, and more.

For the past year, I’ve authored a monthly column on aging for the Tribune Co. newspapers, which was distributed widely across the country. Also, I’ve hosted more than half a dozen hour-long Web chats on aging issues and written extensively about these topics on my blog, Triage (now discontinued), and in the news pages of the Chicago Tribune, where I was a senior health and medicine reporter until recently.

Please feel free to contact me via email (judith@healthjournalism.org) with questions or suggestions about how to improve this site. I’m eager to make it as useful to you as possible.

Pia Christensen (@AHCJ_Pia) is the managing editor/online services for AHCJ. She manages the content and development of healthjournalism.org, coordinates AHCJ's social media efforts and edits and manages production of association guides, programs and newsletters.