The May 13 story on hospital infections emerged from an earlier article about a program that dramatically reduced infection rates at some New Jersey hospitals. But these hospitals would not release their actual rates – only their rate of decline. The story found that hospitals in New Jersey simple refused to release infection rates, even as they claimed to have better than average rates. The state, meanwhile, collects very limted data and keeps it from the public, sometimes using hospital codes to shield hospital names. The story detailed the secrecy surrounding this crucial area of medicine. The July 1 story looked at New Jersey’s Cesarean section rate, the highest in the nation, and the efforts of women trying to obtain vaginal births after Cesarean sections. The Ledger pushed health officials to release hospital-by- hospital C-section rates and then put all the data on-line, making this information easily available to the public. It looked at the possible reasons behind the state’s high C-section rates. The Dec. 2 to Dec. 3 articles emerged from the reporter’s day-to-day coverage of health issues in New Jersey. She had written about several reports showing a higher use of medicine in New Jersey, including the nation’s highest C-section rates and high rates of nursing home residents who are hospitalized. She started to see the connections and then focused on the larger picture of expensive, high-tech deaths in New Jersey. The series showed a striking culture of medical practice in New Jersey that leads to over-treatment of patients, especially the elderly. The story looked beyond the compelling numbers and included provacative stories of patients and families. It also pushed for explanations and solutions. (A sidebar not included in this submission profiled compassionate end-of-life care that helped one family experience a so-called “good death”.) The second part of the end-of-life series sent the reporter and a photographer to Utah to examine how things work in a state and medical system at the opposite end of Medicare spending charts. The comparison showed that more medicine is not always better medicine.
See the archived story and contest questionnaire about how this story was written.