COVID-19, the media and the NHS

by Victoria Macdonald

For media to tell the story of COVID-19, access is needed to hospitals, GP surgeries and care homes at the heart of the pandemic but securing permission to film comes with a range of challenges. 

You’ll learn:

• About the relationship between media and NHS comms teams and the efficiencies needed

• The importance of expert access and briefings so data can be represented appropriately at short notice

• How greater trust should be placed in comms teams to work with media to achieve responsible and accurate journalism

In late January the first COVID-19 cases were confirmed in the UK. That was just over five months ago, as I write this. Five months. It feels as if it were only yesterday and at the same time it feels like a lifetime.

It has been non-stop, it has at times been frightening, it has been exhilarating, and it has been frustrating – all packed into those five tumultuous months and with the prospect of many more months to come.

Therefore, to be asked to offer a journalist’s perspective on NHS comms during this pandemic, means having to temporarily remove yourself from the midst of the mayhem. Not easy.

Certainly, what I am writing now is not necessarily what I would write in peace time, as it were. The way journalists and NHS comms teams have operated during COVID-19 has been everything from exemplary to excoriating – with vast swathes in the middle.

Is that different from normal? Not entirely but it has been – is being – done under a spotlight and with incredible and often unrelenting pressure as we all deal with and learn about this new virus. 

Seeking efficiencies

Early on in the pandemic, the health and science correspondents / editors and producers at ITN (Channel 3, 4 and 5) wrote to the newsroom heads of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), NHS England (NHSE) and Public Health England (PHE) to ask how both sides could be more efficient in the way we were working.

Partly, this was born out of our frustration at unanswered phones, which when finally picked up would only lead us to be told another NHS organisation was dealing with that aspect of the pandemic. We were getting red finger syndrome (I just made that one up but I am sure it exists) from repetitive calling.

But we also wrote the email because all of us have been doing this job long enough to know that if the phones weren’t being answered it was because the comms teams were swamped. 

Our question was also how can we help you? We did not get an answer to that one but I am sure it would have been ‘call less’ and to the credit of DHSC, NHSE and PHE more people did seem to be brought in, although the default then appeared to be a request for an email. More red finger syndrome.

A heavy responsibility

Throughout this pandemic, my fellow health and science journalists have felt, over and above everything else, the need to get our stories right. This is no different from the non-pandemic years but COVID-19 added a whole new layer of responsibility.

The consequences of spreading misinformation were enormous and our need for fast and accurate information was vital.

We were and are operating in a period of mistrust of the media and of fake news and that weighed heavily.

There were days when new research, new Government announcements, new death rates and new infection rates all landed at once and you had minutes or just a few hours to untangle it, interpret it and make it digestible for your audience or readers.

To that end, one of the first things the comms team at DHSC did was organise briefings that were invaluable. As the chief medical officer and the medical director among others sat at the top table, you felt you were getting the right information at the right time.

Naturally, there were questions unanswered but we generally left feeling that was because right at that moment nobody had the answer, not because it was being deliberately kept from us.

Information sharing for a common goal

Through the excellent Science Media Centre, we have had access to scientists, doctors, behavioural modellers, the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser. It felt as if we were all working towards a common end: accurate and responsible journalism.

NHS Providers, the NHS Confederation, the Health Foundation, the Kings Fund and the Nuffield Trust have all helped and guided with briefings, analysis, their general and collective wisdom – and given us guests for the programme.

Of course, there are also the ones who have not helped or been forthcoming with information, or have not answered a question in time or answered it at all. Indeed, I had a response to one story at 7.20pm, some 15-and-a-half minutes after the story had gone out.

Pandemic or no pandemic, transparency is what we journalists long for and problems arise when we feel information is being withheld. It is in our DNA to go after it and that will always cause tensions.

One esteemed health journalist told me of a trust comms person outright denying a story that had been excellently sourced only for the story to appear two weeks later elsewhere. Mix up, cock up, obfuscation? Who knows but it tastes sour.

Yet there have been times when there has been a lack of transparency that has felt political rather than the fault of the comms teams. The tracing app and the problems with its development is an example. The test and trace system and our attempts to find out why the granular data was not being given to directors of public health. Why it took PHE nearly six weeks to give us the inspection reports on personal protective equipment.

None of this appeared to me to lay at the door of comms teams but rather at the door of their bosses.

The importance of access

For a television journalist, however, accuracy is but one part of the package. Access was needed to the hospitals, GP surgeries and care homes that were at the heart of the pandemic. This was where the story was and this was where we needed to be.

This is how it would go: I would ring a trust comms person, usually someone I have an established relationship with. We would talk through what it was I would like to film, how I would like to film it, how long it would take, what voices we could get, whether there were patients well enough to be interviewed.

There would be a general agreement that this would be good to do and I would hang up confident that it was all sorted. Except it never was because NHSE was in charge and it was down to them as to whether we got the access.

To this day I have not worked out whether it is better to ring the trust comms first, get their general agreement and then ring NHSE or vice versa. Both ways worked and both ways did not work. 

At one point, we got the approval from NHSE for the filming (having put the request in more than two weeks before) just as we – err – had finished the filming. For trust comms teams this could be as frustrating as it was for us.

More than once a trust chief executive, wanting to highlight how well their hospital had performed during this pandemic, was astonished to find filming was being pulled or not agreed to. 

The centralised control over local trust comms teams has been growing for some time but right now it is in an iron-clad grip.

Trust the media and comms teams to do their job

I understand the need for hospitals and their patients and staff to be protected and for them not to be swamped with film crews, but perhaps there needs to be more trust in us to do the right thing. 

I will be forever grateful to the comms teams (Claire and Clare specifically) at Epsom and St Helier and at the Royal Brompton who ensured we were able to film probably the most moving, most inspiring pieces I have ever been involved in.

The filming at Epsom and St Helier nearly didn’t get the approval we needed and so the Channel 4 News viewer might never have seen staff rising to the occasion, going above and beyond; the patients frightened but knowing they were in the best place possible. There would have been no interview with the CEO Daniel Elkeles who explained why the very difference in the size of copper piping meant the difference between getting oxygen to COVID patients and not getting it to them.

These are stories that need picture, that need the people and that are powerful on television. Gwen, standing on her doorstep with her community health team saying she had been too frightened to go to hospital, so they had come to her. That was her voice, in her words, telling us what it is like to be 94, alone and scared of COVID.

So thank you again to all those who have made our filming possible. There are many of you out there.


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Victoria Macdonald is health and social care editor at Channel 4 News. She is an award-winning journalist, who has been covering health and social care issues for Channel 4 News since 1999.

Victoria reports on changes in the NHS - the reforms and the politics - whether it is in hospitals or in the community or indeed, in Westminster.

She closely follows the care system and how it impacts on the elderly and those with disabilities as well as investigating issues, including mental health, HIV/Aids and TB, and child health.

Victoria is originally from New Zealand and worked for the Sunday Telegraph before joining Channel 4 News.

Twitter: @vsmacdonald