The journalists he let inside Long Island Jewish Medical Center were led by an award-winning director, Matthew Heineman, whose just-released documentary, \u201cThe First Wave<\/a>,\u201d is being hailed for its up-close realism<\/a> of a hospital at the pandemic\u2019s outset. There were none of the disasters\u00a0that other hospital executives claimed to fear if\u00a0they granted access to journalists: No violations of patient privacy occurred,\u00a0none of Heineman\u2019s team contracted the virus,\u00a0and the hospital\u2019s staff has warmly embraced the film.<\/p>\n With the Omicron variant starting to overwhelm the U.S., the lessons learned from Northwell’s experience are timely in the extreme: hospitals do not have valid excuses for keeping journalists out, and letting\u00a0reporters inside will\u00a0confront skeptics with graphic evidence that might sway some of them.<\/p>\n A still from Matthew Heineman\u2019s documentary feature \u201cThe First Wave,\u201d filmed inside the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New York.<\/p>\n \nPhoto: National Geographic<\/p><\/div>\n In an interview with The Intercept, Dowling became the first senior\u00a0executive in the health care industry to say publicly that it was a mistake for hospital leaders\u00a0to\u00a0stand in the way of journalists\u00a0trying\u00a0to report on the\u00a0fatal seriousness of Covid-19.<\/p>\n \u201cI think they were unsure whether they can trust what goes on inside their organization,\u201d\u00a0Dowling said. \u201cThey were wondering, ‘Well, this is dangerous, why would you do that, you\u2019ll never know what will come of it, this could be a disastrous [news] report, it could all be negative about mistakes that are made.\u2019\u201d He added, \u201cBut that\u2019s the risk you take, and I\u2019m not afraid of taking risks like this. Because I believe, especially in this case, telling the real story was important.\u201d<\/p>\n As previously reported by The Intercept<\/a>, the general exclusion of journalists from U.S. hospitals\u00a0early in the pandemic meant that there were scant photos or videos of patients\u00a0afflicted with the virus. This paucity of graphic imagery came at a malleable time when Americans were making up their minds on whether lockdowns and other anti-Covid measures were truly necessary. While it is impossible to say whether stronger visual evidence would have diminished the skepticism that took root in the early days, a number of academics<\/a> and doctors<\/a> believe that would have been the case.<\/p>\n The pandemic has\u00a0exposed\u00a0how the documentation of what\u2019s unfolding in an emergency room or intensive care unit can have a real impact on public safety and national politics. In less fortunate countries that have been consistently rattled by war or natural disasters, hospitals are common locations of newsgathering<\/a>, because that\u2019s where the casualties and their truths are found. If climate change and political turmoil in the U.S. lead to a greater number of mass casualty events, hospitals will increasingly become contested spaces where corporations come into conflict with journalists trying to report the news that’s unfolding behind their closed doors.<\/p>\n The head of the American Hospital Association, Richard Pollack, declined an interview request for this story. The AHA provided\u00a0a vague statement from Nancy Foster, its vice president of quality and patient safety policy, who noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health authorities recommended that hospitals restrict outsider access to prevent the spread of Covid and that even family members were not let inside at the pandemic\u2019s outset. \u201cMedia visitation policies always prioritize patient safety and privacy, along with whether hospitals have the material and staffing resources to ensure members of the media can visit safely and without unduly disrupting patient care,\u201d\u00a0her statement said.<\/p>\n CEO of Northwell Health Michael Dowling poses with nurses, doctors, and other staff during an event at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, N.Y., on April 23, 2020.<\/p>\n \nPhoto: Lev Radin\/Pacific Press\/LightRocket via Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n Hospitals are big business. The largest network in the country, HCA Healthcare, had revenues of more than $51 billion in 2020, and its CEO was paid more than $30 million that year. The educational and professional profiles of the industry\u2019s CEOs<\/a> tend to be little different from\u00a0those in other fields: While some have medical backgrounds, most worked their way to the top as managers and began their careers with business degrees. The prospect of letting journalists roam around their facilities during a pandemic is about as\u00a0welcome to them as it would be for executives at Facebook or Exxon Mobil to let reporters attend strategy meetings during a public relations crisis.<\/p>\n In most ways, Northwell is a typical\u00a0health care company. Like many, it is structured as a nonprofit,\u00a0though\u00a0the\u00a0business practices of these nonprofits are largely indistinguishable from for-profit networks. Dowling is paid very well for his services \u2014 more than $4 million in 2019, according to the latest salary information<\/a> available, and 14 other executives at Northwell earned in excess of $1 million that year. The company has acted aggressively to collect unpaid bills: In 2020, as most hospitals in New York ceased legal actions against overdue patients because of the pandemic, Northwell sued more than 2,500 people for an average of about $1,700 plus interest, according to the New York Times<\/a>, which described it as \u201ca flood of litigation even as the pandemic has led to widespread job losses.\u201d (A Northwell spokesperson told The Intercept that more than half of those suits were filed by hospitals affiliated with the network but not owned by it.)<\/p>\n\n When it comes to media relations, Northwell is an outlier. In the 1980s and 1990s, Dowling was a senior official in Gov. Mario Cuomo’s administration, serving as health director and deputy secretary to the governor, which means that Dowling came into\u00a0health care management\u00a0after public service rather than\u00a0business school. \u201cI spent 12 years in government where I was in front of the media all the time,” Dowling recalled. “I was not uncomfortable with that at all.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2001, Dowling was selected as the leader of what was then called North Shore-LIJ Health System, which in 2016 was rebranded as Northwell Health; the company now has more than 75,000 employees and annual revenue of\u00a0about $15 billion. Dowling\u00a0has become the most visible executive in New York\u2019s hospital industry\u00a0\u2014 according to the LexisNexis database, he was mentioned in far more news articles from 2018 to 2020 than the CEOs of other hospital systems that are more famous, such as Memorial Sloan Kettering, NYU Langone Health, and Mount Sinai Health System. Dowling even has an active Twitter account<\/a>, unlike the other CEOs.<\/p>\n His profile during the first year of the pandemic was enhanced by a close association with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the son of Dowling\u2019s former boss. Dowling assumed an unofficial position as Cuomo\u2019s top Covid adviser\u00a0in the private sector, often appearing at press conferences with him. When the time came for the first FDA-approved doses of the Covid vaccine to be delivered at the end of 2020, a nurse and doctor at Northwell\u00a0were selected to receive them \u2014 a boon for the company\u2019s profile,\u00a0as the event was broadcast live by CNN<\/a> and showed Dowling standing beside nurse Sandra Lindsay and Dr. Yves Duroseau.<\/p>\n Northwell Health employee Yves Duroseau, MD, right, chair of emergency medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital who volunteered to be the second person to receive the Covid-19 vaccination at Northwell Health at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, speaks during a press conference in Queens, New York on December 14, 2020.<\/p>\n \nPhoto: Timothy A. Clary\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n In what turned into an unintended dry run for the pandemic,\u00a0Northwell gave a green light in\u00a02017 for a documentary team to\u00a0film at\u00a0its Lenox Hill Hospital. The team\u00a0worked there\u00a0until the end of 2019 and crafted an eight-episode series for Netflix called \u201cLenox Hill<\/a>\u201d that came out in 2020. An extra episode was added after the team was allowed to return to Lenox Hill as the pandemic began. So at the start of the Covid-19 crisis, Dowling actually had two teams\u00a0of independent journalists inside his hospitals: one at Lenox Hill, the other at Long Island Jewish.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was not a big leap for us at all,\u201d\u00a0he said. \u201cWe have been doing these kinds of things for years.\u201d<\/p>\n A key concern expressed by hospitals is that a journalist might disclose the name or identity of a patient without their consent, violating the privacy law known as HIPAA and potentially leading to heavy fines. But there\u2019s a simple workaround that Northwell reached with the Netflix team and with Heineman\u2019s team: The hospital was allowed to view a rough cut of their work before broadcast to make sure that every patient who was identified had given their consent.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had gone through that experience, we knew the protocols that would have to be followed, we knew the privacy issues that we had to deal with,\u201d Dowling said. \u201cI had other hospital CEOs say to me, ‘Man, this is crazy that you allow people to sit in your hospital watching everything that goes on full time for months on end.\u2019 My attitude is, I\u2019m\u00a0OK with it.\u201d<\/p>\n Most CEOs were not\u00a0OK with it. Their decisions to\u00a0ban\u00a0reporters, taken\u00a0one by one\u00a0and with an impact that was collective,\u00a0helped turn the\u00a0sudden battle against Covid-19 into a long war\u00a0with hundreds of thousands of victims\u00a0whose terrifying\u00a0plight could not be witnessed.\u00a0This spared Americans\u00a0from the medieval inconvenience of seeing the suffering and death of\u00a0a plague in their midst. In its first months, the pandemic was defined by empty streets and grounded planes, by\u00a06 feet of\u00a0distance between\u00a0nervous people, and by the\u00a0strained faces of hospital\u00a0workers who\u00a0were swamped and frightened.<\/p>\n The enemy was microscopic, and its victims were invisible.<\/p>\n The post As Omicron Surge Begins, Hospitals Have New Reason to Open Covid-19 Wards to Journalists<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n This post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The pandemic has revealed how reporting on what happens in hospitals can have a real impact on public health.<\/p>\n The post As Omicron Surge Begins, Hospitals Have New Reason to Open Covid-19 Wards to Journalists<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":391,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439596"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/391"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439596"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":439838,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439596\/revisions\/439838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"86772\"](\"https:\/\/prod01-cdn04.cdn.firstlook.org\/wp-uploads\/sites\/1\/2021\/12\/TheFirstWave_Stills_Selects.00166205.jpg\")
\nTelling the Real Story<\/h3>\n
![\"CEO](\"https:\/\/prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org\/wp-uploads\/sites\/1\/2021\/12\/GettyImages-1210876594-Michael-Dowling.jpg\")
\nTaking Care of Business<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/prod01-cdn05.cdn.firstlook.org\/wp-uploads\/sites\/1\/2021\/12\/GettyImages-1230124586.jpg\")
\nPractice for a Pandemic<\/h3>\n