Editor:
The recent outrage from our community against Vancouver Coastal Health’s (VCH) autocratic announcement that Shorncliffe and Totem residential care homes would be closed and replaced with a for-profit facility turns out to be an ongoing reflection of VCH’s lack of transparency and corporate rather than community accountability. Our neighbours in Powell River have recently experienced the reality of VCH’s poor management concerning how they source their food for their residential facilities. On the website rabble.ca, Powell River writer and columnist Murray Dobbin recently penned a scathing criticism of VCH’s food contractor Sodexo, a French multinational that supplies meals for VCH. “Food shortages, meals of poor quality, meals not served on time and small portion sizes” are commonplace, Dobbin quoted from an article in Powell River Peak. The most shocking revelation is the lack of accountability that VCH signed off in their contract with Sodexo. “The contract stipulates that VCH and Sodexo would … agree on ‘standardized and uniform responses to questions from the media,’” according to a report in The Tyee from 2012. Further to this agreement is a confidentiality agreement that does not allow for the public to know where the food comes from and what it costs. Say what? How could we have arrived at a place where corporate confidentiality trumps public accountability?
At the recent Sechelt Town Hall meeting we learned that consultation, accountability and transparency were empty phrases from VCH’s handbook of set PR phrases for the unwashed to accept without question. The details of the Trellis contact are unavailable to the public. It is an understatement that VCH’s relationship with its private partnerships lacks the level of transparency that engenders trust and confidence in our health services. Disgraceful!
Neil Bryson, Halfmoon Bay
