Tag Archives: alex plough

Help Me Investigate in 2013 – and 2014

As Help Me Investigate starts to plan new investigations in 2014, it’s a good time to look back at what we’ve been up to over the last year across the four sites (not including this blog). It’s easy to forget how much you do in a year – thanks to the many contributors who made everything below happen. As always, we’ve learned a lot and hit the new year wiser.

HMI Health

Help Me Investigate Health kicked off the year by organising an event on reporting the new health system with the BBC College of JournalismIn April we took part in and reported on a masterclass on health reporting organised by the National Union of Journalists and in May we spoke at and liveblogged a Medical Journalists Association event on the reorganised NHS.

HSJ logo

HMI Health editor Tom Warren and HMI Education editor Matt Burgess worked with the Health Service Journal to compile a list of FOI emails for clinical commissioning groups – the new bodies controlling health spending.

And we scraped the data that helped Scotland’s Sunday Post report on councils abandoning elderly people because they couldn’t afford the care at home and a 7% increase in absenteeism in Scottish authorities.

We also reported on Barnet, Enfield and Hillingdon referring fewer than 4% of depressed patientsNHS Merseyside spending £65,000 on re-hiring staff who worked for its predecessor, and the worst times to go to A&E in the Midlands. Continue reading

Live coverage of the Centre for Investigative Journalism Summer School

Help Me Investigate have sent Abbey Hartley to cover the Centre for Investigative Journalism Summer School, which starts today from 9am.

Speakers include former editor of Help Me Investigate Health, Alex Plough, the tax expert John Christensen; FOI specialists Paul Francis and Brendan Montague; and Andrew Jennings, the man behind investigations into the International Olympic Committee and FIFA

Watch out for her tweets @abbey_hartley and updates here on the Help Me Investigate blog.

HMI in 2012 – and 2013

Time for an update on what’s happening across the Help Me Investigate network – and if you want to join in.

Help Me Investigate Health has been very active. Alex Plough has been looking at CCGs: the new bodies which will control £60bn of health spending from April. To that end we’ve compiled a list of emails if you want to FOI those new bodies, as well as details on CCG websitesuseful Twitter accounts and news feeds to follow, and various other pieces of information. Thanks to Celia Seymour, Duarte Romero, Jason Cobb, Carl Plant, Tony Hirst and others for chipping in.

In March we’re also organising an event in Birmingham on reporting the new health system. If you want to come, let me know.

Help Me Investigate the Olympics continues to scrutinise the Olympic torch relay – Carol Miers and Juliet Ferguson have been digging into one particularly interesting question and we hope to have the results of that early in 2013. If you want to get involved, get in touch.

Congratulations to Ben Harrow of Help Me Investigate Education and Chie Elliott of Help Me Investigate Welfare, who both landed new jobs this year, Ben’s in particular as a direct result of work on HMI. 

As a result, both Help Me Investigate Education and Help Me Investigate Welfare are looking for new editors at the moment. The response so far has been great, but if you want to help people find out more about either of those fields, get in touch.