Letter: Former SDH Board sets the record straight

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On behalf of the former Board of Directors for the Sydenham District Hospital Corporation, I would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and extend to all our very best wishes for the holiday season.

Its been a while since we have spoken publicly and that has been on purpose. Following the appointment of both the Investigator and the Supervisor for CKHA, we have done our best to work with first Bonnie Adamson and now Rob Devitt to ensure that they had all the facts and information that we could provide and that they needed to complete their jobs. Our thanks go to Bonnie Adamson for her work and her report and to Rob Devitt for the improvements that he has contributed to CKHA and to Sydenham Campus to this point in his tenure.

As a Board, we were and continue to be very proud of the professionalism that staff at both campuses had and have continued to show through very trying and challenging times.

In the effort to defend SDH we have been well served by our elected representatives both at the federal and provincial levels. Monte McNaughton helped with the call for an investigation into the affairs of CKHA and Bev Shipley has now written a letter calling on the Supervisor for CKHA to do more to inform the public about what improvements have been made to CKHA’s organizational structure and about what we might expect over the coming months. We agree with Mr. Shipley that there needs to be more public information about what is happening and more public engagement around the health services that we need. We would like to remind everyone that a lot of that work has already been done with the adoption of the VISION report for the Sydenham – Bkejwanong – St. Clair healthcare planning district.

It was, in part, Mr. Devitt’s response to Bev’s letter and an organizational communication titled ENGAGE sent to all CKHA employees that caused us to pause and realize that a public statement from the former Board needed to be made and was long overdue. It is also, in part, a concern that has been lingering for some time with the SDH Board that we were somehow responsible for the predicament that CKHA found itself in.

Nothing is further from the truth.

First, respecting the Investigator’s Report – Bonnie Adamson found a lot of problems at CKHA and these problems were well documented in her final report. Much of what she found and reported on were concerns also raised by the SDH Board or by the SDH Membership over the entire time that we were an active membership and later when the current Board came into office. Very little of the Investigator’s Report found the SDH Board at fault.

The part of the report that suggested:

“… the Boards have been complicit in administration’s long pattern of decision making regarding resource allocations that have resulted in the deterioration of SDH’s physical plant”

was troublesome to us but we felt that a greater good was being achieved and we decided to remain silent on that point. As a result, we took it on the chin.

Its time to set the record straight.

– Since 2014, the SDH Board has not been complicit in under-resourcing SDH (In order to be complicit, there must be different organizations acting together to further an agenda)

– We were actively involved in directing that solutions be found to the lack of resources for our building.

– We uncovered the long lost letter that promised $500,000 in HIRF funding.

– The Board and the SDH Membership has had the building’s condition at the top of our agenda since 2010

– Questions were raised from the floor as early as 2008 (prior years dates are based on recollections of the Board of Directors and have not been verified by a reference to the minutes of the Corporation’s Annual Minutes)

– In 2015, through the efforts of the past chair, we convinced the Ministry of Health to look at alternatives and directed our staff to review options that would be acceptable to the communities that are served by SDH

To suggest that the SDH Board or any of the 539 members or any of the patients and communities served by SDH were in any way complicit in this under resourcing is just plain wrong.

The Investigator’s Report went on to blame all three Boards for lack of oversight and failure to ensure a fiscal soundness within the financial structures of CKHA. It read as follows:

“All three Boards have demonstrated a lack of oversight regarding a serious financial deficit which had been accumulating over time.”

This claim of fault was also troubling to us.

– When the current SDH Board took office in 2014, CKHA staff were projecting a modest surplus in operations.

– In 2015, staff reported that our fiscal situation was sound enough that we could guarantee a loan to ensure the completion of the new Chatham-Kent Hospice

– Also in 2015, staff recommended a routine increase in our line of credit

– All of this came from our professional staff with no concerns raised by either our creditors or by our Audit and Finance Committee. No concern was raised by officials at the Erie St. Clair Local Heath Integration Network

– Our fiscal situation changed dramatically in the fall of 2015 and the due diligence on the part of SDH was to report this to our membership and to advise what steps were being taken to resolve this funding issue.

– By early 2016, it was clear that significant changes to our operations needed to be considered.

– Chatham Boards and the administration saw a solution in the closing or radical reduction of services at SDH.

– SDH Board saw this problem as much bigger and one that required a much more thoughtful approach and that also required an organization wide solution.

– SDH called for an organization wide review that was denied by the other Boards and ridiculed by our administration

– In early April of 2016, our administration and the two Chatham Boards colluded in a plan to lock out SDH from any further governance activity

Given all of this, it is difficult to imagine how the SDH Board could be faulted for lack of oversight. On a few occasions, we had to explain to the administration and the other two Boards what oversight actually was and at another point in the process, the SDH Board was individually chastised by CKHA lawyers for exercising too much oversight.

You can be certain that the SDH Board was not complicit in under-resourcing SDH nor did we exercise a lack of oversight regarding CKHA’s financial situation.

Second, respecting the Supervisor’s Terms of Reference and the improvements he has made to date –

As the now former SDH Board, we are encouraged to see the significant improvements made by the Supervisor to the administrative and clinical leadership at CKHA. Interim senior leadership and new senior leadership will provide critically positive direction towards solving the foundational problems that have plagued CKHA and that have undermined the Sydenham Campus for over 10 years. There is no question that covert plans were in place to eliminate the services provided by SDH to the communities within the Sydenham – Bkejwanong – St. Clair healthcare planning district. There is also no question that this covert plan was a collusion between CKHA administration and the two Chatham Boards.

The Supervisor has much work ahead of him, including:

1. Selection of new clinical and administrative leadership to direct the operations of CKHA into 2020 and beyond. Rob Devitt, CKHA’s Supervisor and Ken Deane, the interim CEO, must select the very best people for the task at hand. These appointments will be carefully watched and evaluated so that mistakes of the past are not repeated and the confidence of the public is ensured. This is particularly important to the public in the Sydenham – Bkejwanong – St. Clair District.

2. Re-establishing the Boards with appropriate skills and competencies, reflective of the community served by the hospitals. The membership and the communities within Sydenham – Bkejwanong – St. Clair have been very supportive of the former SDH Board and the question that lies ahead for Mr. Devitt is what skills and competencies do the members of the former SDH Board not possess?

3. Determining the role of the SDH Membership. SDH has a robust membership that should not be overlooked when considering a new governance structure for CKHA. It is within Mr. Devitt’s authority to determine what the role should be for the 539 members.

We will continue to work with the Supervisor for as long as he chooses to include us as he deals with the challenge of establishing a sustainable governance structure for CKHA and we will continue our fight to ensure that the VISION that we have created and the District that we have championed gets full consideration by CKHA, our LHIN and the Ministry of Health.

It is our hope that Mr. Devitt will agree to attend an SDH members’ meeting in the very near future to discuss all of this with you. As soon as we know that a date for this information meeting has been selected we will make the appropriate arrangements and forward that information to you.

-Sheldon Parsons, former Chair, SDH Board, on behalf of Conrad Noel, former Vice Chair, Herb John, former Director, Kris Lee, former Director, George Lung, former Director and Rex Isaac, former Director.


* Editor’s note: This letter was sent to Rob Devitt, CKHA Supervisor, Ken Deane, Interim CKHA President and CEO, Dr. Eric Hoskins, MPP, Minister of Health and Long Term Care, Bev Shipley, MP, Monte McNaughton, MPP, SDH Corporate Members and the media.

1 COMMENT

  1. A factual, well worded letter by our former board who continue to work for us with a high level of compassion and knowledge for the betterment of health care within the communities served by the Sydenham Campus. In return we owe it to our former board and to ourselves to be ready to professionally challenge those setting out our future area health care direction in the Sydenham Campus catchment area. If the thought is to take this opportunity to autocratically do away with our SDH open board based on the actions of the past two consecutive CKHA Senior management teams and 2/3rds of the former tri-boards we are more than up to the challenge. We need only to remind ourselves that it was our open board process and democratically elected representatives on the tri-board that saved us from being forced to line up at a former grocery store to receive what others had decided was all they would give us for our health care needs.

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