Workers brave the freezing cold to greet arriving board members at Ontario Shores. Most board members ducked the demo by arriving early.
Problem was, the hospital told the union the board meeting was half an hour later starting than it really was. Only a handful of late arriving board members encountered the union picket line.
Ontario Shores has had issues with being a public hospital.
While the Ontario Hospital Association has called for greater transparency and has long established guidelines around open board meetings, Ontario Shores has been reluctant to sign on.
When we inquired about the board meeting, we were told that attendance was by invitation only. While they did extend an invitation to the union, we were given the wrong time despite the fact that the only in camera session on the agenda didn’t occur until the end of the meeting.
The hospital claims it wasn’t an error. The first item on the agenda, they say, was educational, and that the real meeting didn’t formally start until the agenda was adopted. Which raises the question, if the first item on the printed agenda was educational, how did they proceed with that item without first approving the agenda?
Arriving while the meeting was in progress, having to leave due to the in camera session, there was no actual time to informally speak to board members.
Ironically, the first item we missed on the agenda was a briefing about the hospital’s obligations under Freedom of Information legislation. Bill 122 will require hospitals to open up their files to Freedom of Information requests beginning January 2012.
Meanwhile, our Freedom of Information Request to the Central East LHIN still awaits an answer regarding any documentation to show some due diligence on their part as Ontario Shores radically changes the parameters of an important adolescent mental health program that serves youth from across Ontario.
To date the LHIN has maintained that the changes are within the hospital’s decision-making scope.
Ontario Shores maintains that the decision to change the delivery model for the Adolescent Residential Rehab program is based on best practices and evidence. However, we have been asking for documentation to support their claims since December.
Recently a meeting was offered to go over the evidence that they have so far denied us.
For more on this story, go to:
No Evidence, But Plenty of Runaround
There’s a big surprise, this place is just like the banks in the effect that all they care about is making themselves look good by acting like they are on another planet. If half of the staff there wasn’t management or higher, maybe there would be money left over to pay the rest of the staff that actually runs the place…