Announcing A Health Journalist Toolkit – To Help Get The Facts Straight

Beyond just evaluation and constructive criticism of news stories, we want to reach out to help journalists.

We know they often struggle with reporting on the costs of treatments, tests, products and procedures.  It’s reflected in the facts:  after 5 years and nearly 1,500 stories reviewed, we don’t like to report that more than 70 percent of stories fail to adequately address the costs of the stuff they’re covering.

So we talked with journalists and others to assemble our first stab (and that’s all it is – a first stab) at an online list of resources to help journalists explore the costs of health care products and approaches.

There are some links to websites, names, email addresses and phone numbers.

This is just one of many primers and resources offered on our site.  Here’s a screen shot of the listing of primers available in the Toolkit.

We also point journalists to “Covering Medical Research: A Guide for Reporting on Studies,” a guide I wrote for members of the Association of Health Care Journalists.

We were pleased to see that the National Association of Science Writers also pointed its members to our Journalist Toolkit in a web posting this week.