Healthy Ministry on mission to improve epidemiology reporting -targets internal public relations personnel, hopes to reach journalists

Nov 27, 2018 News

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Without proper grounding, reporting on issues of an epidemiology nature could prove to be disastrous. This observation was made recently by Head of the Public Relations and Health Promotion Unit, Mr. Terrence Esseboom, when he spoke at a two-day training workshop.

The workshop, which targeted personnel within the department headed by Esseboom, was seen as a necessity to help address glaring shortcomings in health reporting.
Esseboom noted that while the workshop was initially intended to target local journalists, the Ministry only had the capacity to avail training to the key staffers. He is, however, convinced that the needed change can start within the Ministry and eventually be filtered to the media fraternity.
Currently, most of the staffers within the Unit are very young people and, according to Esseboom, “we don’t have grounding in health, so I think we should be able to intelligently and accurately convey what is happening in the sector…so we decided that we are going to do this.”
This was necessary, he said, because “for one, we are unfamiliar with a number of things in the health sector and we have to report on these and if we don’t have grounding in these [issues] that could be a little disastrous.”
“Not because we are the PR Department, we are not going to ask the Minister or other officials the hard questions and demand the answers. It is conceived that the department will be able to do a better job so that if we all can’t reach the source of information; at least we can do that in the department,” Esseboom

said.
He noted that although his staff has been able to benefit from the training, journalists also deserve to be exposed. “What I really wanted was for our journalists to have an appreciation for this…this was how this was conceived. We recognised a lot of time when you pick up the newspaper, there are so many flaws in the report and it is very superficial reporting.”
He continued by pointing out, “What happens a lot of times in health is stenography and not journalism, because people don’t know…they don’t know the questions; they don’t have the grounding, so they don’t have understanding of the basic philosophy of epidemiology. If you are going to interview somebody, you need to know the kinds of questions so you need to have background knowledge of the issue.”
The training session, which was held in the boardroom of the National Blood Transfusion Service at Lamaha and East Streets, Georgetown, saw Esseboom focusing on the journalistic aspect of reporting, while the expertise of Sasha Walrond, Epidemiologist within the Surveillance Department of the Ministry, dealt with the technical aspect of epidemiology reporting.

“It is important how we report on diseases and everything pertaining to diseases so that we don’t violate people. We need to know exactly how to report, because the health sector is a kind of peculiar sector…we can’t be as cavalier as in other sectors because that would have implications; people can die and people can panic and we recognise that,” Esseboom noted.
While recognising the need for reports to be critical at times in the quest to keep the public informed, Walrond stressed the need for information contained in published newspaper articles to be verified before they are released for public consumption.
Even as she highlighted the need for information to be verified, she noted that persons can seek to reach out to key Ministry officials as well regional health officials and other persons. “This is important so that they can get the information to help them better understand what they are reporting on and by extension, ensure that the public has accurate reports,” Walrond added.
She continued by pointing out that, “Different diseases are going to carry a different level of effort, but I really think once they have the understanding, they are going to understand the type of questions they need to ask and understand that data is never stagnant; it is always going to keep changing, especially if you have an outbreak scenario.”
The training session, which was in the pipeline many months ago, is a tactical move employed by the Ministry, slated to position it to better report on epidemiological situations.
“We have the Venezuelans coming in from Region One and there is a possibility that things can happen, but we don’t want things to happen then start scrambling. Sometimes, we don’t have the money or time to bring in the private people and we have to do it ourselves. So if somebody from the PR department has to go into one of the regions, they have to have the same kind of skills…critical, analytical tools that journalists are supposed to have so that they can ask the proper questions,” Esseboom asserted.

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