Reporting on end-of-life issues can be touchy for everyone involved and journalists need to handle issues of death and dying with sensitivity and skill. Understanding the processes, both clinical and legal, the nuances, and methods to manage such emotional issues with patients, families, and care providers, will result in more effective and powerful stories.
Sharpen your reporting skills and learn more about treatment decision making, health care near the end of life, hospice and palliative care and ethical issues that accompany them.
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Join us for a webcast on Wednesday Aug. 7 at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT. Send questions in advance to liz@healthjournalism.org.
This event is exclusively for AHCJ members. We encourage you to log in to the website a few minutes early. We will be using Adobe Connect software that may require that your browser download a quick add-on to view the webcast.
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Our expert panel includes:
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 V.J. Periyakoil, M.D., is director of Palliative Care Education and Training at Stanford University, director of the Stanford University Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship Program, Stanford University, director of the VA Interprofessional Fellowship in Palliative Care, at the VA’s Palo Alto Health Care System and associate director of Palliative Care Services at VA Palo Alto Health Care System. She will talk about cross-cultural health issues that arise in working with patients and families.
Her paper, “Multicultural Long-Term Care Nurses’ Perceptions of Factors Influencing Patient Dignity at the End of Life,” is available to AHCJ members.
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 Nancy Berlinger, Ph.D, is a research scholar at The Hastings Center and an author on end-of-life care. Her interests include treatment decision-making and care near the end of life; ethical issues in the management of chronic illnesses; access to health care for undocumented immigrants and migrant workers; and the ethics of workarounds and other practices for managing problems of safety and harm in health care systems.
Berlinger directed The Hastings Center project that produced the revised and expanded second edition of the Guidelines for Decisions on Life-Sustaining Treatment and Care Near the End of Life. Journalists can get a review copy of the guidelines by contacting Susan Gilbert at the Hastings Center at gilberts@thehastingscenter.org or 845-424-4040 x244.
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 Lisa Krieger is a San Jose Mercury News health reporter whose multi-part series on death and dying chronicled her personal experiences with the process. At the center of Krieger’s unflinching account of her father’s last days is an uncomfortable question: “Just because it’s possible to prolong a life, should we?” Her articles, which won an AHCJ Award of Excellence in Health Care Journalism, brought an outpouring of reaction from readers, demonstrating that reporters can sometimes tell the story from an unusual perspective and touch readers in a different way than would be possible with more traditional coverage.
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Liz Seegert, AHCJ’s topic leader on aging will moderate. Seegert writes blog posts, assigns and edits tip sheets and articles and gathers resources to help AHCJ members cover the many issues around our aging society. Her reporting and writing background spans more than 25 years in print, broadcast, and digital media, covering an array of consumer and professional health topics, including wellness/prevention, chronic disease management, women’s health, aging, health policy and health IT.
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