A Day In The Life Of… Hugh Pym, BBC Health Editor

BBC Health Editor Hugh Pym became a household name when the world was plunged into lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, reporting on crucial information for the nation.

We caught up with Hugh at the Student Publication Association National Conference 2024, where he spoke to us about a day in the life of a health journalist, the positives in specialising, developing skills as a journalist, and the comings and goings of the BBC office.

My day starts at…

One of the great joys of journalism is the unpredictability of it. You never quite know what’s going to happen each day. You have a pretty good idea if there’s a big diary story, a big event, or a big policy announcement. But you could wake up in the morning and something may have developed, and you just have to react to it.

It can be a bit difficult sometimes, if somebody’s got the lead on you. Other times there’s an announcement that’s unexpected. But the unexpected nature of your day is really what keeps the adrenaline flowing.

My typical day involves…

On an average day, I have a reasonably quiet start and then take part in an office health team Zoom, which just tries to sum up where we are with each day and what’s happening. In the health team, we have colleagues in Salford, colleagues in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, [we’re] just feeling for what’s going on because it’s such a big field.

And then the day will develop, if it’s quiet I might get home after the six o’clock news, and sometimes the 10 o’clock news will want a story, it all depends. And sometimes it’s an early start, doing early radio for The Today Programme and 5 Live. It’s very hard to tell you there’s an average day, because it can vary so much.

I always thought I’d be…

I wasn’t very sure, but I remember at school, there was a sort of careers room, a little library. This was well before the days of the internet and mobile phones, so there were lots of brochures about potential careers and I had a flick through them. I must have been about 17, and the one about journalism looked quite interesting because it was about a journalist in South Wales and she had such an interesting day. Covering sports, going out to interview a farmer, coming back from a council meeting. I thought that sounds quite good.

I hadn’t really done very much about it at university, and that’s where student journalism is important. If you can build up a file of your reports online or broadcast, it just looks so good on your CV. I didn’t do any of that at university. I came into journalism after doing my finals, working for a business information service. Then I got onto the postgrad diploma course at Falmouth University for radio journalism, and I thought that if I did this as well as getting a diploma, it would get me a placement at two local radio stations, which it did.

I got the job because…

I worked in network news for ITV News and ITN, covering business and politics. I had quite extensive experience, I worked for Sky, and I came back into covering business and economics at BBC News in 2001. They created a new post of Health Editor, and I was very interested in public policy and how big institutions like the NHS worked.

I had a bit of knowledge of treasury and public spending issues, and my late father is a GP and my brother’s a doctor. My colleague Fergus Walsh, who was also at Falmouth a year or so after me, is the Medical Editor, so he does a lot of the medical research stories. The health team is very able and very helpful, so I benefit greatly from other people’s research.

I’m most proud of…

It’s difficult to think of one thing, I suppose a general point is conveying difficult stories that matter to people. That could be when I was covering economics during the banking crisis and the recession, and what all these banking collapses mean. A key priority in broadcast news is distilling what it means, and not talking down to people, just trying to explain how it might affect everyday lives.

In health sometimes, during the Covid pandemic, that could be challenging. Other times, we’d convey it and people would express appreciation for what we were doing. Fair enough, people criticised our coverage, but I think those moments where people say that you explain something and they understand it, it’s a privilege to do it. I’ve been very fortunate to be in these roles in the BBC.

We’re conscious that either people suffered through losing loved ones, or the consequences of lockdown had huge implications for many families and people throughout the country. We were conscious we had jobs to go to, and as we were key workers, we could go into the office. We had a privileged position in being able to carry on with what we were doing. And we did our best to get the news out there in the most informative way possible.

Early on, I was told…

I suppose it’s using your local knowledge and your contacts to find out what’s going on. Years ago, after Falmouth, I worked in local radio in my home area of North Wiltshire. It was a studio in Wooton Bassett called Wiltshire Radio. My father was the GP, and he knew everybody in the town, and my aunt who lived locally. My family knew so many people that they gave me good stories. For example, my aunt told me that one of her neighbours had had something put through her door from about RAF Kemble. US fighters would be based there, and they might be quite noisy, and no one else knew about this at the time. So, make use of any contacts you have to gain information.

The other thing I was told early on by brilliant local newspaper correspondent Jim Gilmore; he said specialise. If you’ve got a real interest in something, go into that specialist area. It could be music, it could be sport, and, for him, it was a big interest in equestrian events. I suppose for me it was covering business and economics, politics, and health at different times. You can go into it not being an expert — but become knowledgeable enough to ask the right questions.

For those wanting to follow in my footsteps, I would say…

Develop your skills as a journalist. That could be putting things together, subbing and layout. I think be as ambitious as you can. Don’t think: “Oh, I’ll never get an interview with that person.” Just go for it. Some very successful careers have been based off starting out in student journalism and getting an exclusive, and then if it’s a really good story, offering it to national media.

The thing I’d like to see change in the industry is…

We have a pretty robust, free media. I think it’s maybe wrong of me to talk about other media [outlets and sectors], because I know it’s a pretty privileged position to be at the BBC funded by the licence fee.

I’d struggle to think of any immediate changes, so I guess to all work collectively and maintain the vigorous, competitive media. Maybe different bits of the media have slightly different slants on the news but let’s do our best to keep the diversity of media. And that includes local media.

After work…

It’s such an unpredictable business that doing much midweek in the evenings isn’t always very good, planning ahead. Me and my wife Susan, who’s been amazing, don’t get to go out much during the week. But we all like watching sport in our household. My wife’s a Scot, so we like going to Scotland rugby and watching cricket and going to the theatre where we possibly can. It’s usually leaving it until the last minute, that’s the thing, booking in advance is always a bit dangerous, because you never know what you’re doing to be doing in this job.