Cabinet secrecy cited to withhold health amalgamation papers

The Newfoundland and Labrador government is not releasing documents that outline why it decided to collapse health boards into four large authorities, including Eastern Health.

CBC News applied under access to information legislation to see documents relating to the 2004 decision to amalgamate hospital, nursing home and community health boards into four large boards.

Little information was released, and 106 pages of the internal decision-making process are considered largely a cabinet secret, CBC was told.

Eastern Health and its fellow boards were created in early 2005.

At the continuing judicial inquiry into flawed breast cancer testing, the issue of amalgamating the boards — and a prior decision in the 1990s to combine the Health and Social Services departments — has been raised with several witnesses.

Last week, former Eastern Health chief executive officer George Tilley testified that the authority was coming to grips with serious problems in its pathology lab at the same time that it was reorganizing into a much larger entity, with services provided across dozens of communities on the Avalon, Bonavista and Burin peninsulas.

"It was the probably the item that consumed the greatest amount of time," Tilley said.

Pressured to cut management ranks

As well, Eastern Health was pressured by the Treasury Board to cut management brought over from former boards. Tilley said he needed those managers to cope with the shakeup.

"When you restructure, that's the time you need them the most," said Tilley, who will continue testifying before Justice Margaret Cameron when the inquiry resumes on Thursday in St. John's.

But Premier Danny Williams has dismissed suggestions that his government is responsible for problems at Eastern Health.

"This was very serious in June 2003, when this government wasn't in place and when the amalgamation hadn't happened," Williams said recently, referring to the date when a memo was written by a pathologist that laid out issues that included "grossly inadequate" staffing levels and problems with the quality of testing.

Inquiry counsel have probed other witnesses about the size of Eastern Health, as well as the amount of responsibilities now covered in the Health and Community Services portfolio — by far the largest in the Newfoundland and Labrador government.

Health Minister Ross Wiseman, for instance, was asked whether he felt the department was too large, given that he had not had time to read briefing notes on the cancer tests for about four months in 2007.

Wiseman testified that the department is large, but is manageable because of how it is structured.

The Cameron inquiry is examining what went wrong in the St. John's pathology lab during 1997 and 2005, when hundreds of breast cancer patients received inaccurate results for hormone receptor tests. The inquiry has been largely focusing to date, though, on how officials handled the crisis after they learned of it in 2005.