Emily Bader, a health care reporter for The Maine Monitor, has been named one of 13 members of this year’s Health Coverage Fellowship from the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation.
The fellowship is designed to help the media improve its coverage of critical health care issues. It does that by bringing in as speakers more than 75 health officials, practitioners, researchers, and patients.
It also brings the journalists out to watch first-hand how the system works, from walking the streets at night with mental health case workers to visiting labs that make stem cells and vaccines.
The fellowship will focus on a series of pressing issues — from preventing future pandemics to treating mental illness, rooting out racial and ethnic inequities, redressing homelessness, and rethinking later-life care. Attention also will be given to breakthroughs in medical treatments and curbing health care costs.
The fellowship is housed at Babson College’s Executive Conference Center in Wellesley, Massachusetts and directed by Larry Tye, who covered health and environmental issues at The Boston Globe for 15 years.
Other health and science fellows include Brenda Goodman of CNN, Alex Janin of The Wall Street Journal, Katie Jennings of Forbes, Sydney Lupkin of NPR, Sabrina Malhi of The Washington Post, Olivia Aldridge of KUT Radio in Austin, Amanda Beland of WBUR in Boston, Fred Clasen-Kelly of KFF Health News, Katy Golvala of CT Mirror, Sophia Paffenroth of Mississippi Today, Annmarie Timmins of New Hampshire Bulletin, and Brittany Trang of STAT.
The program, which is entering its 23rd year, is sponsored by the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, with support from the Bower Foundation in Mississippi, Connecticut Health Foundation, Endowment for Health in New Hampshire, Fledgling Fund, KFF, Maine Health Access Foundation, National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and, in Texas, the Episcopal Health Foundation, Congregational Collective at the H.E. Butt Foundation, Methodist Healthcare Ministries, and St. David’s Foundation.
