HeaRT - Health Reporter Training Project

Calling health journalists, working journalists, journalism students, editors and publishers. Top up your specialist skills and knowledge!

Training sessions available in London June 10-11, and in Coventry: contact John Lister for details.

Download a leaflet here.

EU funds FREE training for health reporters: 4 days in June

British health journalists are being offered up to 4 days of FREE training this summer, in an EU funded project to improve the quality of health reporting. Two days will be delivered in London (June 11-12), and two in Coventry (June 14-15). Editors and employers are also invited to arrange customised sessions for staff in their workplaces. The training has the support of the NUJ and the Medical Journalists Association.

The HeaRT (Health Reporter Training) program has taken sample polls of journalists in all seven partner countries (Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Romania, Spain, and the UK) to determine their background training, and what additional support they may find useful. Most journalists in the polling said they preferred face to face training.

A package of training sessions has been designed, and online resources will also be available over the summer for those staff and freelance journalists who cannot attend the courses in person, or who want to follow up on some of the issues as a result of attending a course. The British sessions will cover eight of the topics:

• The Business & Economics of Health Care
• Medical Research and Science
• Health Care Quality and performance
• Health Policy: government health reforms
• Understanding hospital and other financial reports
• Health inequalities
• Global Health
• How to evaluate conflicts of interest

CLICK HERE for more details of the British training sessions.

Dr John Lister can be contacted by e-mail or on 07774 264112.

NOTE: The courses are free of charge, but spaces are limited, and the project is required to deliver a certain number of training opportunities. So to reserve a place, journalists should send a refundable deposit cheque for £50, dated June 11 2012, and made out to Coventry University to:

Dr John Lister, Media Department, Coventry University, Priory Street, Coventry CV1 5FB.

All cheques will be returned on arrival at the commencement of the training. Places can only be confirmed when the cheque is received, and will be allocated on a first-come first-served basis.

Interviews with keynote speakers

The conference in Coventry on June 23-24 heard from a number of high profile specialists in different aspects of health journalism. A book is to be compiled from the papers presented. In the meantime, four of the keynote speakers have given brief interviews which can be downloaded here.

Afrodite Veloudaki, from Greece, who is the director of the 7-country EU-funded HeaRT project for Health Reporter Training across Europe.

Play recording

Trudy Lieberman, a veteran health journalist from the US, former President of the Association of Health Care Journalists, and an expert on US health reforms, who was visiting Coventry University as a Fulbright Senior Specialist.

Play recording

Gary Schwitzer, from HealthNewsReview.org, a leading campaigner for the improvement of the quality of reporting of health and medical issues.

Play recording

Francoise Cluzeau, senior adviser for the international arm of National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the UK, speaking with John Lister, campaign journalist and Senior Lecturer in Health Journalism at Coventry University (who organised the conference on June 23-24).

Play recording

John Illman, former health editor for The Guardian, chair of the UK Medical Journalists Association between 1996-2002 and in a 'caretaker' capacity in 2010, speaking with Simon Pipe.

Play recording

For further information contact John Lister

NEW BOOK

Europe's Health for Sale: the heavy cost of privatisation
Edited by John Lister
Libri Press, £19.95, http://www.libripublishing.co.uk

David Cameron keeps insisting that Andrew Lansley's controversial Health and Social Care Bill does not mean privatisation of health services. But this new collection of articles from a number of European countries points to the covert methods that are increasingly being used to do just that, though the development of competitive market systems.

The papers were presented at a 2009 conference of the International Association of Health Policy in Europe, hosted at Coventry University: but the issues are just as relevant and immediate today.