One of the best decisions I made for my career happened a few years after graduating from journalism school. At the time, I was writing the biography of a cancer geneticist named Janet Rowley. Writing a book can be lonely, so to counter that, I started freelancing for a local hospital. I didn’t do it strategically to advance my career; I simply felt compelled to work more collaboratively, and the hospital’s marketing director had been a former editor of mine.
Twice a week, I worked on-site, sitting in on C-suite meetings; shadowing physicians, therapists, and nurses; and interviewing patients. I had the chance to help run communications during a citywide emergency drill. I learned Vietnamese from the translator, hearing her speak with patients often enough to pick up on both niceties and medical terms. I took chair yoga and Zumba classes with the seniors in the senior center.
I did all of that because I needed material for the hospital’s social media, blog, and newsletter. It was marketing, not journalism. But I learned the power of presence. The more I showed up, the more people opened up. The experience gave me confidence in the language of medicine. Over time, I also learned the business of healthcare — what it takes to run a 300-bed hospital in one of the largest cities in the country.
Of course, it wasn’t all chair yoga. I saw the tough decisions required to run a hospital. How did the administrators decide who to furlough when the census was too low for too long? How would the hospital respond to unhoused people seeking shelter in the ER? Who were the highest-revenue physicians, and how did administrators balance keeping them satisfied with meeting everyone else’s needs?
I still talk regularly with friends I made there, more than a decade later. They’ve moved on — some by choice, others because they had no choice. And that’s part of the business of healthcare, too. People often go into medicine because they want to care for others. Yet, time and again in the United States, we’re seeing that much larger agendas are at play. The professionals who care for us might feel called to their roles, but they’re working within a system that prioritizes profits over people.
Under that system, we’re all pawns — hospitals, so often bought and sold; physician groups and staffing companies delivering care; and patients trying to do their best despite the lack of control they feel when interacting with the healthcare system.
One of my favorite people I met during this time didn’t seem to care whether he was a pawn. He had been in that position before, drafted into the Vietnam War. Decades later, David Rogers would time-travel back to that war whenever someone dropped a heavy book or set off fireworks. People who saw him duck for cover in those moments thought he was unstable. They saw his behavior, not his history.
It happens often in cities. We see people act erratically, who sleep under viaducts or on park benches. David used to walk the parks near the hospital, seeking out those very people to connect them with medical care, housing, and other services. He found many veterans that way.
He showed me that people who are compelled to care do so regardless of whether the systems they work within are working for them. They do so because they’re needed. And many of the people we talked to in this issue are doing exactly that.
