Leadership vacuum at CKHA

If front-line employees at the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance acted in the same manner as its board and senior administration, heads would roll and possibly lives would be lost.

Thankfully, there exists a level of professionalism that senior administration benefits from and would be wise to emulate.

The CKHA’s recently dormant public relations efforts chugged back to life with the joyous news that it had reduced administration expenses (of which we’re glad).

Of course they didn’t bother to say they’re still above average locally, provincially and federally.

They also chose to ignore the allegation that somehow they seem to have cost local health care a million dollars by mislabeling the Sydenham Campus. No media releases to explain that one.

It’s par for the CKHA course where “bad news” (anything that hasn’t been sanitized and spun to make the Alliance look good) doesn’t exist.

Like a petulant toddler, the CKHA covered its ears and says, “I can’t hear you” to questions it doesn’t like.

This is what passes for management and governance.

It’s comparable to having a doctor tell you that you don’t have dandruff but not informing you that your sucking chest wound might be a bit of an issue.

The Alliance loves to tell you it has a plan to upgrade the emergency department in Chatham but find it impossible to say good things about the Wallaceburg emergency department, even after it was specifically praised by the province in a letter to head honcho Colin Patey himself.

They ignore the fact that emergency room wait times are too long or tell you the “bad numbers” don’t really mean much anyway.

They gush over hiring a new head of emergency medicine but decline to tell you he’s a part timer seemingly brought in for his ability to toe the policy line as much as his medical skills.

For months they carried around “facts” condemning the Wallaceburg campus only to find out the entire medical advisory team was clueless on what they actually meant.

We may get a spate of letter from employees telling us working at the CKHA is heaven on earth (much like the employees who were volun-told to stand in as props and clap on cue during a recent media conference) but if we do, we know who really wrote them.

Alliance officials seem to believe they’re in a world where no one has access to information or is entitled to an opinion but them.

We all suffer for that myopia.