Published: 28/02/2002, Volume II2, No. 5794 Page 19
Media coverage of the NHS is running at unprecedented levels. Much of it is ill-informed, distorted and biased. A fundamental journalistic technique is to illustrate big themes by showing how they affect individuals. Newspaper readers find it easier to grasp abstract issues through stories about real people.
Fine - up to a point. The problem for the NHS is that with a staff of 1 million treating many millions of patients every day, it proffers a virtually infinite number of individual stories to illustrate virtually any line any journalist may want to take.
Unfortunately, for political reasons, several national newspapers' health coverage starts from the assumption that the NHS is failing and ought to be replaced. They can draw on a wealth of material to support their thesis, conveniently overlooking the equivalent wealth of material which contradicts it.
Anecdote is presented as evidence for anything from the state of casualty departments to the safety of MMR.
So we have some sympathy for Department of Health communications director Sian Jarvis's complaint (at the conference mentioned above) that media coverage is damaging public confidence.
No doubt it is: polls consistently show those who have used the NHS think better of it than people whose views are based on what they read.
But the DoH cannot abdicate all responsibility for the image which surfaces in the press. Ironically for so media-conscious a government, confusing and contradictory messages leave Richmond House, as poignantly demonstrated in Dartford and Gravesham.
Communicating effectively with staff is the starting point without which there can be little hope that positive messages will ever be received in the wider world.
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