Canadian Lawyer InHouse

INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT Ontario hospitals had a steep learning curve when it came to getting their information ready for public consumption. By Jennifer Brown OPENING UP THE VAULT In the fall of 2011 Alan Belaiche was general counsel at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto when he was co- chairman of the hospital's Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act readiness task force. As of Jan. 1 hospitals in Ontario would formally fall under the legislation. Requests could be made for information that came into the custody or control of a hospital on or after Jan. 1, 2007. That' not to say Ontario hospitals never com- plied with requests for information, but it means there is now a formal regulatory regime in place for them to follow. It also put a framework around specifically what information could be accessed and for how long. Given s FIPPA would require the hospitals to react quickly and comply within a framework of exemptions and exceptions, Belaiche decided to champion a records-retention policy. "I wanted to consider the in-house that requests made under largely able to escape the formal gover- nance process required for information requests unlike other institutions in the province and around the country. It wasn't the only issue senior executive management at Ontario hospitals would have with increased disclosure of personal information. In an attempt to encourage further transparency the Ontario Hospital Association issued advice suggesting top executive team compensation packages be disclosed on the individual hospital web sites, along with board minutes and financial plans. "We agreed in the big picture this was capacity to manage and respond to free- dom-of-information requests and to initi- ate an education and training process for staff including physicians," he says. Belaiche, who left St. Mike' year to start his own practice, Belaiche Law, says he received some pushback from the senior executive. It was an exam- ple of how hospitals in Ontario have been s earlier this 28 • JUNE/JULY 2012 something the public was going to be interested in and that there was a ben- efit of putting it on our web site in a way everyone could have access to it rather than just waiting for individual requests," says Megan Evans, chief legal officer and risk officer with the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. This would be information above and the Public Sector Salary beyond what Disclosure Act in Ontario requires in terms of disclosure of compensation information of any public employee earn- ing more than $100,000. In light of the Drummond report issued in February of this year, which highlighted the province' projected $30 billion deficit by 2017, and need to cut costs across almost every area of government including health care, it INHOUSE s was somewhat of a pre-emptive strike to provide greater transparency on health- care spending. Some in-house counsel at Ontario hospitals argue the OHA's push to have full executive compensation packages published online went further than what freedom-of-information legislation would typically permit, but it was all in an effort to strip away any question about where dollars were going. When it came to preparing for infor- mation requests, for many Ontario hos- pitals it meant they had to create poli- cies to determine who would handle FOI requests, how the information would be accessed and generally make it clear to all employee groups that such informa- tion would now need to be available to the public and that in future, items once thought confidential might one day be asked for by the public. "We like to think that we have his- torically been a very transparent organiza- tion and accountable to our stakeholders including the public but it was informal up until Jan. 1. People would call in and ask for something and we would think about the reasonableness of the request and when it made sense we would work with them and when it didn't we wouldn't. Now it' s much more formal," says Evans. But Evans stresses it meant educating a workforce of 8,000 people on what was a

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