A reporter who relies only on official sources will often miss the real story. To a seasoned journalist, that may sound like a clich’. But in my Knight International Journalism Fellowship in Uganda, where independent media are very new, I’m trying to help journalists understand the need to dig deeper and find new sources, especially when it comes to health reporting. Recently, I got to see stunning results– $130 million worth in fact.

In 2008, a reporter I was working with, Kakaire Kirunda of the Daily Monitor newspaper, set out to write a story about the country’s hospital system. On paper, it’s an orderly and well-conceived array of district, regional and national hospitals, each designed to handle certain types of cases while passing more complex ones up to higher levels. In reality, though, the system is broken. The lower-level facilities often lack manpower and equipment, so the triage system doesn’t work. Patients flock in large numbers to the higher level sites, which are overwhelmed.

Kakaire’s story became a series that the Monitor called ‘Our Sick Hospitals.’ It worked because it relied not on official sources, who generally painted a rosy picture based on the theoretical ideal, but on patients who used the shoddy hospitals and on experts like Freddie Ssengooba, a lecturer at Makerere University School of Public Health — Chris Conte, Knight International Journalism Fellow