The Tri-Board of the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance will be meeting tonight, albeit in an informal capacity.
The regular meeting was cancelled for this evening after five of the seven directors for the Sydenham District Hospital Board resigned, which did not allow the Tri-Board to achieve quorum.
Brenda Richardson, chair of the executive committee for the tri-board of directors, said a lot of work is in store.
“We are meeting to bring everyone up to speed and talk about the next steps,” she said. “There is a lot of ground to cover to basically figure out what we are going to do. The first step would be that the remaining Sydneham members and the other two boards will be meeting to figure out what the next steps are, and take those appropriate steps, whether it be now or whether we wait to put the slates forward at the AGM in June.”
The volunteer board members who resigned include chair Allen Klink, and directors Paul Weese, Ted Dalios, Ed Freeburn and Wendy Weston. The only remaining members on the board are Gary Martin and Herb John.
Richardson said she couldn’t discuss the reasons why the people resigned.
“At this point in time, I’m not in a position to disclose really any details of the resignations, they are voluntary, and they were provided in confidence to the Tri-Board and those folks are volunteers, and we need to respect their confidentiality,” she said. “At this point I can’t get into why did they resign. We’re basically working through the next steps for what we have to do as a Tri-Board.”
Richardson said they’ve never had this many resignations all at once.
“In the past we’ve never had this volume of resignations, but we had from time to time had resignations,” she said.
The annual general meeting for the Tri-Board had been slated for June 26.
Richardson said it is not known whether the meeting will be pushed up, or if the vacancies will be filled beforehand.
“We aren’t moving swiftly, we are wanting to take our time and make sure that we’re actually making the right decisions,” she said. “We want to involve all the appropriate parties that need to be involved in this. It will be a process in the making and we have to consider all kinds of stakeholders in this.”
Richardson said this situation does not affect the daily operations at any of the campuses of the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance.
“We’re in very good shape as a hospital, this is clearly a governance issue of the Tri-Board that we will need to dealing with,” she said. “The impact of the operations itself at the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance is they have a limited impact on the day-to-day operations. The Alliance will continue to operate very well. Over the long term a lack of quorum could impact the ability of the Sydneham hospital and the Tri-Board to execute their fiduciary duties, such as the approval of their financial statements which is another item that gets approved at the AGM. We do have some work to do before June.”
