Tories run themselves over driving Shared Health emergency rescue vehicle By: Dan Lett Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Wednesday, May. 3, 2023

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/05/2023 (892 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You would think a provincial government working desperately to prove to its citizens it knows how to manage a health-care system would be able to manage a simple news release without creating controversy.

So why, you may ask, has Manitoba’s Progressive Conservative government made such a hash out of the announcement that Lanette Siragusa has been appointed CEO of Shared Health?

Following the sudden resignation last week of Siragusa’s predecessor, Adam Topp, finding a replacement had to be an urgent matter. For the government, it was an opportunity to demonstrate it could fill a leadership vacuum at Shared Health quickly and competently.

The Tories did move quickly, but in a manner that showed very little competency.

For reasons that are still unclear, the province issued the news release on Siragusa’s appointment in the middle of the afternoon last Friday, right near the end of the weekly news cycle, with no supporting access to either Siragusa or Health Minister Audrey Gordon.

No one should be surprised that Gordon was a no show for her own news release.

For several days, the health minister had been in hiding, refusing to do interviews about Topp’s resignation, or the tabling of a damning consultant’s Shared Health report on the well-being and morale of health-care workers that had been obtained via leak by the opposition NDP.

In short, the year-old report confirmed that just about everyone toiling in the health-care system has reached the breaking point. Its 34 recommendations form an alarming list of all the things the province is currently not doing to support those workers.

Still, it was unusual that government appeared to be trying to dampen interest in Topp’s replacement. Issuing a news release late on a Friday afternoon is a political strategy called “taking out the trash,” in which problematic or controversial announcements are timed to discourage news organizations from digging too deeply into the details.

It’s hard to see why the government wouldn’t have wanted to trumpet Siragusa’s appointment in the loudest way possible.

Siragusa is well-known to Manitobans thanks to her work as chief provincial nursing officer, a role that required her to take a front-line role in the province’s pandemic response and do countless daily briefings with Dr. Brent Roussin, Manitoba’s chief provincial public health officer. And it must be said that given all of the struggles in health care — out-of-control wait lists for surgical and diagnostic procedures, a critical shortage of doctors and nurses — there were likely few people who wanted this job.

By all measures, Siragusa is more than adequately qualified for her new job, and her decision to step into the role on short notice — less than 24 hours after Shared Health announced Topp’s resignation — were the building blocks of a good-news story.

Issuing a news release late on a Friday afternoon is a political strategy called “taking out the trash,” in which problematic or controversial announcements are timed to discourage news organizations from digging too deeply into the details.

That good news story was buried, however, beneath questions about the timing and the decision to leave out an important piece of information: likely as a condition for agreeing to step into the CEO’s role, Siragusa is being allowed to continue working one day a week as the vice-dean of education at the University of Manitoba Rady Faculty of Health Sciences.

The vice-dean role was created for Siragusa after she stepped down from her high-profile role helping to direct the pandemic response. Her decision to continue in that role part time is not really controversial. Leaving it out of the news release certainly was.

It is not unusual for the top medical professionals to concurrently hold clinical, academic, research and administrative responsibilities at the same time. Although it might be more unusual for the CEO of Shared Health to retain a part-time role elsewhere in the health-care system, it’s hardly precedent-setting.

So, why not just announce it up front and get it out of the way? And moreover, why not provide an opportunity for reporters to talk to Gordon and Siragusa about the appointment and how the dual roles would work on a go-forward basis?

The timing and content of the news release certainly gives off all the signals of a story the government would rather keep under wraps. If that wasn’t the intended end result, then it’s just the latest in a long list of examples of how elected officials and political and communications staff who support them cannot perform even the most rudimentary tasks without blowing themselves up.

At the very least, anyone inside the Tory government involved in this debacle needs to think long and hard about the unnecessary grief they have generated for Siragusa.

The timing and content of the news release certainly gives off all the signals of a story the government would rather keep under wraps.

With the health-care system struggling on almost every front, only someone really brave or really naive would take on the role of Shared Health’s CEO. And how do you reward the person who stepped into a very stressful role on short notice? By casting needless doubt on the circumstances of her appointment?

Moving forward, the people inside government — elected and not — who messed up this important health-care announcement might consider modifying a mantra that, ironically enough, is found in the Hippocratic oath that all physicians must take before the practice of medicine.

Whenever preparing a news release, first and foremost, do no harm.

dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com