The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "shortage" ...
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Hospital at Risk
My investigation of the Minnesota Security Hospital, a state-run facility that provides psychiatric treatment to nearly 400 adults deemed "mentally ill and dangerous," uncovered high rates of violence and injuries of employees and patients at the facility, a critical shortage of psychiatrists, and widespread confusion among employees about what to do when a patient becomes violent. I found that much of confusion was the result of the abrasive, threatening management style of head administrator David Proffitt, who was hired in 2011 to reform the facility. I began investigating Proffitt and found he was hired without a basic background check. I uncovered many troubling details from Proffitt's past, including domestic violence, a PhD from a now-defunct online degree mill, a forced resignation from his previous job as the administrator of a private psychiatric hospital in Maine, and other failings. The state ordered Proffitt to resign and the Minnesota legislative auditor began an audit of the department's hiring practices. The assistant commissioner of the Department of Human Services who led the hiring search also resigned. The governor proposed $40 million in renovations to address safety concerns. Regulators from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration visited the facility for the first time in 21 years. The facility also implemented new training for employees to reduce violence. My investigation of the facility continues.
Tags: Psychiatrists; domestic violence; injuries
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Parking Patients
"Parking Patients" examined the amount of time hospitals in the Memphis area were taking to assume custody of patients brought to their emergency departments by city ambulances. In hundreds of cases we found patients were spending hours strapped to ambulance stretchers, waiting inside emergency departments for hospital staff to sign off on the transfer of care. In the meantime, city paramedics were tied up waiting with the patients and unavailable to answer other emergency calls. We found dozens of cases in the last year in which the city ran out of available ambulances to answer these calls, and had to rely on private companies to fill the gap, sometimes resulting in longer response times. The fire department blamed these shortages on the practice of hospitals using paramedics as "free labor."
Tags: broadcast; hospitals; paramedics; patients; waiting; ambulances
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Post Mortem: Death Investigation in America
"This series focused on the nation's death investigation system, the more than 2,300 coroner and medical examiner offices responsible for probing sudden and suspicious fatalities. They found a profession plagued by a widespread lack of resources, a lack of national standards or regulation, and a drastic shortage of qualified doctors."
Tags: post mortem investigation; coroners; medical examiners; broadcast
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The NYPD Tapes
The series gives an unprecedented look inside the NYPD through the secret recordings documenting police misconduct made by Police Officer Adrian Schoolcraft. Evidence of civil rights violations, a severe staffing shortage, and downgrading of rape complaints are found within the 117 roll call recordings.
Tags: police misconduct; NYPD; undercover; crime; recordings
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Contract Sunshine
This story reveals that state agencies in Wisconsin were not following a four-year-old transparency law requiring them to post contract data online for public review, and that Wisconsin ranked among the worst in the nation at providing such information. Agency directors blamed each other, a lack of enforcement power, technical glitches and a shortage of money.
Tags: Wisconsin; Contract Sunshine; transparency; law; public records; state; online; data;
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Soldiers At Risk: Iraq Water Investigation
With temperatures rising up to “130 degrees or more” a day, why would the military be rationing water to only 2 liters a day per person? The answer is a water shortage. As a result, some soldiers are reporting from “serious physical problems with their kidneys, nerve degeneration, and even serious brain damage”. Further, some of these conditions went on for up to a year.
Tags: Iraq; Wars; medical professionals; officers; Army; Veterans Administration; defenders; troops
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Questionable Care
This five-part series looked into to accidental deaths in nursing homes in the province of Manitoba, which had tripled since 2000. Series installments discussed an overview of findings, problems with bed rails, staff shortages, neglect and reactions to the findings.
Tags: Canada; international journalism; Manitoba; nursing homes; senior citizens; health care; negelect; bed rails; staff shortages
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Careless Detention
Four-part series on the medical treatment of immigrant detainees in the United States. Goldstein and Priest exposed the shoddy, unethical and, at times, fatal treatment of immigrants during their detentions and as they were being deported to their native countries. Their stories led readers deep inside America's network of immigration prisons--a world that had grown exponentially in the years since 9/11, yet remained largely unknown and hidden from view. Their stories documented the deaths of 83 detainees. And in one of the most stunning revelation, Goldstein and Priest disclosed the previously unreported scope of a practice of forcible sedation of immigrants with dangerous psychotropic drugs during deportation to their native countries; they found more than 250 instances in which the drugs were used on people with no history of psychiatric problems. Their stories also revealed that the most prevalent cause of death among the immigrant detainees is suicide, including the hangings of detainees known to be in such fragile mental health that they had been assigned suicide watchers. They profiled the slipshod treatment of an ailing Korean immigrant, a legal U.S. resident for three decades detained in a rail in the Arizona desert, with a history of recurrent cancer. And they documented the flawed medical practices, bureaucratic ineptitude, sloppy record-keeping and staff shortages that cause detainees who are sick to suffer and sometimes to die.
Tags: detained immigrants; September 11th; 9/11; medical treatment of prisoners; immigration prison; HIPAA
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Indentured Doctors
Throughout the United States foreign doctors are being cheated out of wages, coerced into unfair contracts and being kept away from medically needy patients because their bosses are the ones sponsoring their visas. They work for medical residency and are allowed to live in cities and rural areas with shortage of physicians so long as they work full-time. The program was started by the government, but since its creation there has been little oversight to the abuse of the doctors.
Tags: work visa; immigration; J-1 doctors; Pahrump; pediatrician; health care;
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"The Middle Kingdom's Dilemma" and "China's Pollution Revolution"
In this series, the author investigates "the emergence of a grassroots environmental movement in Communist China." In "The Middle Kingdom's Dilemma," the author reveals a plan by the State Council to divert an amount of water that is greater than the total volume of water from the Yangtze River. In "China's Pollution Revolution," Larson writes about a poluuting factory and its negative impact on nearby residents.
Tags: Communist China; grassroots environmental movement; water shortages; pollution; environmental laws; international