The Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) Reporting Fellowships on Health Care Performance is a yearlong program enabling midcareer journalists to pursue a significant reporting project examining health care systems.
The program, in its 16th year, is meant to help journalists understand and report on the performance of local health care markets and the U.S. health system as a whole. To learn more, visit the Association of Health Care Journalists website.
The 2026 program will support five projects:
- Emily Brindley of The Dallas Morning News: Investigating why Texas hospitals report hundreds of surgical errors each year, and whether patients can obtain justice under the state’s strict medical malpractice laws.
- Monica Carrillo-Casas of The Spokesman-Review/Spokane Public Radio: Investigating why Latino farmworker communities in rural Washington continue to face disproportionately high rates of long COVID, hospitalizations and deaths compared to white residents.
- ChrisAnna Mink of the Central Valley Journalism Collective: Examining how federal Medicaid (Medi-Cal) funding cuts and disruptions to CDC vaccine policies are affecting health care and immunization access, including COVID-19 vaccines, for youth in California’s San Joaquin Valley.
- Meg Wingerter of The Denver Post: Investigating a nursing home chain to reveal how ownership structures and regulatory oversight influence system fragility and quality of long-term care.
- Kelcie Moseley-Morris, Nada Hassanein, Shalina Chatlani, Anna Vollers and Sofia Resnick of States Newsroom: Examining how state lawmakers are diverting hundreds of millions in public funding from community health clinics that provide reproductive care to crisis pregnancy centers with limited services, anti-abortion agendas and minimal oversight.