Hannah Alberga

Hannah Alberga reports on health for The Canadian Press, with coverage that links national data, legal decisions and public policy to the way people experience care and risk in their daily lives. Her work stands out for detailed use of surveys, surveillance programs and academic studies, paired with clear explanations of what those findings mean for patients and families. She brings experience from major national and local newsrooms, including The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, CBC’s daily news podcast Front Burner, the Toronto Star, This Magazine and blogTO, which informs a broad, system-aware approach to health reporting.

Health system access and patient experience

Much of Alberga’s recent reporting centres on how people move through the health-care system and where that system breaks down.

She has covered national polling and survey work showing that many residents struggle to access family doctors, face long waits to see specialists and feel the quality of care has deteriorated over the past decade, even as spending has nearly doubled. In these pieces she tracks specific wait-time thresholds, the proportion of respondents affected and how delays in diagnostics and specialist care compound into worse outcomes, keeping the focus on what numbers mean at the bedside.

Her coverage of fertility trends uses Statistics Canada data to show that the country’s fertility rate has fallen to and remained at a record low, placing demographic pressures alongside health-system and social-policy concerns. She treats fertility not only as a statistical measure but as part of a wider conversation about the sustainability of services, supports for families and the changing expectations placed on health institutions. Across this system beat, Alberga’s reporting distinguishes itself by staying close to concrete indicators - poll results, survey percentages, national rates - while drawing out their implications for access, capacity and trust in health care.

Medically assisted dying and end-of-life care

Alberga has built a substantial body of work around medically assisted dying, examining the practice through law, ethics and personal narrative. She has reported on a prominent provider of medical assistance in dying who reflects on a divisive decade of practice, using that vantage point to explore how policy changes, clinical criteria and public debate have reshaped end-of-life care. In another piece, she profiles a filmmaker’s documentary that follows people who chose MAID, focusing on intimate portrayals of death and the relationships around those choices.

These stories emphasize the emotional and moral complexity of assisted dying while remaining grounded in the regulatory framework that makes it possible.

Her court reporting on MAID extends that lens to mental illness, covering an Ontario decision that denied a motion seeking eligibility for medically assisted death on the basis of a mental disorder alone.

In that coverage she lays out the legal arguments, the constitutional challenge in the background and the practical outcome that Canadians cannot currently access MAID solely for mental illness, showing how jurisprudence directly shapes the contours of health care. Taken together, Alberga’s MAID reporting is distinguished by the way it weaves doctrinal details, policy timelines and human stories into a coherent view of how end-of-life choices are made, contested and lived.

Data-driven reporting on public health risks

Alberga frequently uses health surveillance and research data to illuminate risks that cut across environment, mobility and medication. Her reporting on e-scooter and e-bike injuries draws on the Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program to show that dozens of children faced prolonged hospital stays, intensive care admissions or death in a single year, breaking down the figures by severity and region. She positions this as a child safety and injury-prevention story, connecting the numbers to questions about regulation, parental awareness and urban design.

In another strand of coverage she reports on ADHD stimulant prescribing, highlighting research that found sharp increases in prescriptions for women and exploring what that suggests about diagnosis trends, treatment approaches and pressures on prescribers. Her public health work also includes pieces on Ebola-related travel restrictions, documenting how precautionary bans on visa holders from affected countries disrupted lives and stalled immigration applications, even as officials assessed the domestic risk as low.

Across these topics, Alberga’s reporting is marked by close reading of studies and surveillance outputs, careful presentation of numerical findings and attention to the people caught at the intersection of precaution, policy and personal risk.

Environmental health appears in her work through coverage of how wildfire smoke affects brain health, where she explains the mechanisms by which smoke exposure can influence neurological function and situates those risks within increasingly frequent smoke events. As with her other data-led pieces, the emphasis is on translating complex evidence into clear, accessible language that shows how large-scale phenomena - air quality, infectious disease, technology use - enter the body and mind.

Background in national and local newsrooms

Before focusing on health, Alberga worked across editing, digital reporting and audio production roles, notably at The Globe and Mail and on CBC’s daily news podcast Front Burner. Her previous reporting has covered topics ranging from endangered species to abortion rights and federal elections, as well as local news, giving her familiarity with legal, political and social contexts that now underpin her health coverage. She has written for outlets including The New York Times, the Toronto Star and This Magazine, experience that supports the narrative and feature elements visible in her current work on MAID, documentaries and patient stories.

That broader newsroom background contributes to health pieces that are comfortable moving between statistics, court filings, policy statements and lived experience without losing clarity or focus.