That dent won't buff out

Dishonest bureaucrats demolish public trust in NLHS, GNL

NLHS HR VP Debbie Molloy (left) and CEO Karen Stone (right) meet with reports about corruption in the province’s largest health authority. Image: Mark Quinn/CBC

The management strategy at the province’s giant health authority is to bluff their way through the crisis over the obvious corruption inside the organization until an Auditor General’s report puts out what they already know but have done nothing about. They will accept the report with the promise it will never happen again and do nothing about it. This is the time-honoured practice across government in Newfoundland and Labrador.

That bluff might work for the bureaucrats, who will carry on in their sinecures, but this scandal and the ongoing cover-up of it will put a massive dent in political reputations and continue to erode public trust in the health authority and that damage won’t buff out.

NLHS (pronounce it Nil Hiss, just for fun) held a newser Monday and between interim chief executive Karen Stone and human resources vice president, Debbie Molloy, we now have enough to piece together what happened. But they didn’t tell us. We have to read carefully and fill in the bits they left out.

In fact, both Stone and Molloy lied by omission more often than they told the unvarnished truth. Lying is now backed into the entire government culture over the past 20 years, with NALCOR being the biggest and best example not only of how to lie but that lying actually works. No one from NALCOR has ever paid any price for the fiasco of Muskrat Falls and, as Andrew Furey’s crowd have shown, even a reference of the LeBlanc inquiry report to the police means nothing. Incidentally, NLHS HR boss Molloy was manager of labour relations at NALCOR from 2007 to 2011. She learned the dark arts from the best.

Anyway, here’s what we know/don’t know based on the NLHS statement and newser, Might be interesting if someone started probing the people Stone and Molloy didn’t talk about, namely the officials who approved the illegal contracts 51 times.

• Known: Nil Hiss paid 57 leases to employees of the authority who own rental properties.

• Unknown: We don’t know how long these leases ran before senior management discovered them thanks to the nurses’ union.

• Unknown: Why it took so long to investigate the leases.

• Known: NLHS terminated 51 of the leases because they violated the Conflict of Interest Act and the Public Procurement Act. It continued six of the leases that were awarded through public tender.

• Unknown: Why were 51 leases issued illegally while six were issued at least in part legally? The six were tendered but were they also given a prior exemption from the COI Act?

• Unknown: The Conflict of Interest Act requires conflicts to be disclosed and approved in advance. On the face of it, 51 of the leases were initiated by NLHS officials without the legally required prior approvals. But that’s not confirmed although you can infer that by Molloy’s comment to reporters that the employees involved felt they had an “exception” to the conflict rules. We don’t know what that exception was.

• Known: Officials at the health authority whose job it is to follow procedures and comply with the law entered into the contracts with employees of authority without going to tender and without addressing 51 conflicts of interest.

• Unknown: We don’t know why Stone and Molloy deliberately ignore *those* officials and focus only on the property owners in public statements and, implicitly, in the internal investigation.

• Unknown: One of the more bizarre parts of the newser is when Molloy said the health authority only would consider people to have done something wrong if they “were hiding or disguising themselves within this process” and that the absence hiding or disguising was - on the face of it - proof there was “no intent to do something that they shouldn't have done.”

• Unknown: Implicitly then, people inside the health authority can violate any policies, rules, or guidelines so long as they do so openly and with no attempt to hide their actions. Is that real?

Molloy said this approach is the product of the health authority’s use of the Just Culture philosophy. Actually, it isn’t. Just Culture is an approach to accountability that encourages the identification of problems, practices, and procedures inside an organization. As the Canadian Medical Protective Association describes it, Just Culture “is first and foremost a culture focused on the prevention of harm. A just culture is about relationships between team members, the creation of psychological safety, and building systems to continuously learn and improve in a supportive environment.”

In this case, what we are seeing is unaccountability. No one internally divulged any information to prevent harm or identify a problem. Quite the opposite. In fact, it appears many people - especially those whom Stone and Molloy ignored - either didn’t follow policies and procedures, weren’t aware of policies and procedures or failed to put in place fundamental policies and procedures to ensure the government health agency follows fundamental provincial laws.

That latter bit points to people like Stone and Molloy but it would be really weird for there to be no policies. After all, the conflict rules are 30 years old and the new public tendering law is less than five years old. Just Culture is not a fault-free space, either. Sometimes people make mistakes because of fundamental cultural failures within an organization and that seems to be the case here where a fundamental *lack* of accountability - the consistent failure to disclose all relevant information (lying by omission) - is the defining feature of NLHS senior management.

What’s more likely then is that Stone and Molloy are deliberately covering up significant wrong-doing within their organization. That would be the equivalent of a patient dying or being severely injured because a surgeon didn’t follow well-established procedures and no one in the operating theatre tried to stop them. That, despite the fact the basic philosophy of team-centred excellence - Never Pass a Fault - has been around for a century or more and professional ethics require health professionals to prevent harm by timely intervention. If they are lying about small things - like illegal contracts - imagine what they’d do with something really bad, like deaths and injuries.

No one died here and yet Stone and Molloy and others within the health authority are letting it slide, deliberately, too.

It’s almost like no one remembers the breast cancer scandal when - wait for it - after killing a few hundred people through blinding incompetence and arrogance, everyone at the health authority promised it would never happen again. The outcomes are different but the root causes - a deeply flawed internal culture that condones incompetence, arrogance, and in some cases naked corruption - are identical.

Here we are with another display of corruption and while no one has died in this case, a culture of unaccountability thrives through tens if not hundreds of thousands of public dollars handed out illegally.

And no one is holding the health authority leaders to account, either.

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