Media spin
So the following article is a perfect example of the rampant epidemic of negative spin in our media today. But who could have foreseen the ripple effect of closing a large inner-city medical center and not reallocating it’s plentiful resources to the rest of the system?
The author of the article makes it surprisingly easy to agree with suggestive wording that the facility in question is not providing adequate medical care to the patients it sees, subtly accusing it’s practitioners of wrongdoing. However, read between the lines and the article states all the facts necessary to make an absolutely contrary conclusion. That conclusion is the remainder of the County medical system is simply weighed down by a combination of patients searching for services no longer available to them from the closed MLK hospital and the lack of resources for the operating facilities to accommodate that additional load. Those resources would provide more available personnel to triage and treat the mass exodus of patients from the newly under served areas. The problem is not lapse in staff provided care, but a resource issue.
How, then, does the problem get corrected? Well, it looks like a citation such as this will get the ball rolling for funding to remedy the shortcomings, so it’s a good thing. Hopefully. Unless someone wants to see the ripples from dropping in a small boulder.
» From the LA Times: (click link or more for article)
Harbor-UCLA emergency room patients are in jeopardy, state inspectors sayL.A. County will be required to come up with a plan to ease overcrowding.
By Rong-Gong Lin II, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
February 6, 2008Overcrowding in the emergency room at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center is placing patients in immediate jeopardy, according to state inspectors working on behalf of the federal government.
The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services expects to receive a formal citation based on last week’s inspection, another blow to the county’s fragile emergency room system.
In August, the county was forced to close most of Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital in South Los Angeles after its federal funding was revoked because of lapses in care.
The federal government has also threatened to pull funding from another hospital in the county system, Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar, because of deficiencies in care.
The expected citation for Harbor-UCLA, located in an unincorporated part of the county near Torrance, will require the county to establish a plan of correction or risk losing its federal funding.
The investigation was prompted by the Dec. 22 death of William Harold Jones Jr., an emergency room patient who left the hospital before treatment was finished and was found dead in a parking lot across the street.
Jones, 56, was admitted to the emergency room about 1 a.m. complaining of generalized body pain, according to the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.
At 6:20 a.m., he told the staff he was going to use the restroom, but he never returned, the coroner’s office said. The hospital realized a little after 9 a.m. that he had not returned.
Shortly after noon, a passerby found Jones dead on the sidewalk across the street from the hospital.
The coroner listed Jones’ death as accidental and found that he was suffering from diabetes and end-stage renal disease. He also had cocaine in his system.
State officials launched the inspection of Harbor-UCLA last week on behalf of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Los Angeles County health services Director Dr. Bruce Chernof said in a statement Tuesday that inspectors told the county to expect a citation that would say Harbor-UCLA placed patients in “immediate jeopardy.”
Chernof said in the statement that the county is already working on submitting a plan of correction to the inspectors.
Overcrowding in Harbor-UCLA’s emergency room and delays in patient treatment were expected to be highlighted in the citation, according to Chernof’s statement.
Chernof was not available for further comment.
The expected citation is the most recent in a series of problems at county emergency rooms.
In June, the federal government cited King-Harbor Hospital after a May incident in which a woman writhed in pain for 45 minutes on the floor of the emergency room lobby without receiving medical attention; she later died. Most of the hospital was shut down in August.
In October, a 33-year-old patient complaining of chest pains died of a heart attack several hours after arriving at Olive View-UCLA. He was never given a test to check if his heart was functioning properly.
The incident prompted a federal investigation of the Sylmar facility and in December, the federal government threatened to terminate the hospital’s Medicare funding unless it showed evidence that the problems have been fixed.
As the county struggles with its public hospitals, other facilities have felt the strain.
Downey Regional Medical Center, which is close to King-Harbor, had 211 patients about 10 days ago, even though the facility is licensed for 199 beds, said Robert Fuller, the facility’s executive vice president.
“It’s not unusual to hold 10 or more patients in the emergency room waiting for rooms upstairs, and we never used to do that,” Fuller said. “It’s a daily battle to try to find the beds and the nurses to take care of all the patients.”
Jim Lott, executive vice president of the Hospital Assn. of Southern California, said it’s a tragic situation any time a patient dies after seeking treatment at a hospital.
“But patients leaving hospital emergency rooms, unfortunately, is not all that rare,” Lott said. “Our emergency rooms are on overload, our hospital beds are filled to the brim.”
What a coincidence. I was just listening to my old prof William Lobdell on the radio today. He is a staff writer for the LA Times and used to teach a class on the American media, and a lot of it was about putting a spin on the news.
Anyway, it’s so disturbing to see how distorted a story can get by putting a spin on it. And it’s sad because most people will glance at this article and come to exactly the conclusion the writer wants.
Let’s write to Rong-Gong Lin II and tell him he should be ashamed of himself.
i took a class in college all about how the media spins facts based on what the public perception is on that subject at the time. we examined news coverage at the inception of, during and after the vietnam war in great detail. it’s almost impossible to write a story completely biased and 100% factual. and even if a writer attempts to do so, the reader will come to his or her own conclusions regardless.
I agree that it’s hard to write a story with no bias at all, but that’s not really the problem. This is an issue that goes beyond mere bias– it has to do with intentional skewing of a story to get the readers to conclude something that the actual facts do not support. In some contexts like blogs or editorials, it’s perfectly acceptable, but this is supposed to be a news story, which in my mind should be as unbiased as possible. Purporting to be a news story and yet skewing the facts so much is almost fraudulent in my mind. I’m all for readers coming to their own conclusions because well… that’s what should happen, but news writers shouldn’t make that conclusion for them.
hmm… i didn’t see your response reeks until today. i wholeheartedly agree with you. i didn’t mean to imply that this writer in particular attempted to write this article without bias. in fact, based on what jack has told me (someone who is more familiar with the issue than most of the readers out there), perhaps the author purposely meant to spin the story for the sake of controversy or sensationalism. i was simply making a point about the news and media in general.
