On topic

Let’s be clear—it was never a democracy. From the moment Quinte Health Care was formed in 1998 it shared more in common with Soviet era institutions than it did with the community-funded and governed hospitals it replaced. For a while QHC made an attempt to keep up appearances that it cared about what this community thought.

But now the last veil masking this grotesque authoritarian regime has been dropped.

Last week the chair of QHC’s board wrote to each of the hospital foundations to dictate what they will say and do at the hospital corporation’s annual meeting next Tuesday (June 25, 5:30 p.m.). The foundations are composed of mostly volunteers tasked with raising money in the community to pay for hospital equipment and facilities.

Brian Smith directed each of the foundation heads that they have been granted five minutes to tell the board about their fundraising efforts. Nothing else.

“We ask that you keep to this topic and to the allotted time frame,” instructed Smith with breathtaking audacity.

Despite massive cuts to services we have inflicted upon your hospitals, the upheaval this is causing in your communities and the destructive impact these decisions are having on your fundraising capabilities—please, keep these anxieties to yourself, stay on topic and try to be upbeat.

Oh and “we do not expect to have as many people attending as in past years,” added Smith in his note.

How would he know this? Has he hired security guards to police the door to the Travelodge meeting room to keep the community out? Or is he banking on a community so demoralized and frustrated by the deafness of QHC’s board and management to the worries expressed year after year by residents, nurses and physicians in this community they have simply given up?

From the outset democracy was just a façade at QHC. It did not have shareholders as other types of corporation do—whose votes would be binding. Instead QHC offered memberships. For $5 residents in the catchment area of the hospital could attend meetings and consider changes— mostly about cutting services and resources from Prince Edward County Memorial and Trenton Memorial.

But even this pretend-form of democracy proved too restrictive and prickly for QHC management, whose disdain for those who would dare criticize their decisions led them finally to ignore both this community and then their own board.

Governance at QHC collapsed in disarray.

The province appointed a supervisor, Graham Scott, to sort out the mess. This time the community would be cut out of the hospital corporation altogether. Never again would the outrage of those affected by bad decisions be allowed to get in the way of the regime.

Scott appointed a “blue ribbon” panel who hand-picked the next board of directors based upon the skills they brought to the board. This was code for excluding community participation. It mattered not at all the skills one brought—but rather their willingness to go along, stay quiet and stick together. Loyalty to the regime was, and is, the most prized skill. Independent thought is shunned and excluded.

From that point forward only the board would pick its own successors.

It has dropped any pretence of being a representative body. QHC’s board is now a club—a private and exclusive club where decisions are made behind closed doors, beyond the prying ears of residents, patients, staff and media. A club that only appears in public to rubber stamp decisions it has already made. A club bound by secrecy and a deep distrust of the community it is supposed to serve.

So perhaps Brian Smith is right. The QHC chair seems to be betting that this community has simply given up. That after a decade or more of protesting cuts to Prince Edward County Memorial, the fight has left County residents.

Or he has contracted jackbooted thugs to ensure this community stays out of QHC’s business next Tuesday.

Either way our hospital stopped being our hospital 15 years ago. It is now solidly in the hands of a Stalinist style regime—unassailable, impenetrable and certain of its own wisdom and course.

They have no interest in the views of this community, our nurses, our physicians, our health care workers or patients. They do not want to hear it. They do not care what you think or feel.

They only want your money.

Please keep to this topic.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca