Audit Report 24-02: Vancouver Coastal Health Authority's duty to assist

September 10, 2024 by Admin - Communications Staff

Commissioner's Message

On July 26, 2024, British Columbia’s Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry issued an order to end the COVID-19 public health emergency and rescinded all related orders. This move marked the end of a four-year period that began with the declaration of a public health emergency on March 17, 2020.

This period was an extremely challenging time for all people and organizations in British Columbia. It is no surprise that Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH), one of the province’s largest health authorities, faced among the greatest pressures and focused efforts on operational pandemic response and providing core health services.

This audit examining VCH’s duty to assist also spans most of the period of this public health emergency.

Readers of this report will learn how the organization’s responsiveness to freedom of information (FOI) requests suffered during this time – a time of crisis when transparency and accountability were key to keeping people’s trust.

For example, we found:

Undue delays across the board – only a quarter of requests met FIPPA’s 30-day benchmark, and VCH failed to comply with the Act’s time limits in nearly three quarters of responses.
Improper application of time extensions – VCH sometimes extended the time limit without a valid reason, or applied an extension after the original time limit to respond already passed.
Inadequate communication with applicants – roughly a third of the time, VCH did not even acknowledge a request was received.

While these may be signs of an organization facing unprecedented circumstances, our audit found issues that go beyond just organizational pressure:

Following a 2021 amendment to FIPPA, VCH, like other public bodies, decided to charge a $10 FOI application fee for general access requests. VCH administered this fee by only accepting payment by cheque or money order, unnecessarily exacerbating the barrier to access (though it later changed this approach).
VCH has a policy for routinely releasing certain records without the need for an FOI request, also known as proactive disclosure – a practice this office encourages. However, contrary to this policy, there were instances where VCH processed requests for these records as an FOI request and charged the application fee, rather than pointing applicants to where the records were already publicly available. Further, some records that were already public were difficult to find online.
VCH was particularly unresponsive to the media during this period. The average number of days it took to respond to FOI requests from the media was 116 days, peaking at 171 days in 2021/2022.

A period of crisis places public bodies under additional operational pressure. Precisely for this reason, they are also under considerable public scrutiny. People are facing individual and collective threats and they need to know, and be able to verify, that public bodies are doing everything they can to protect health and safety. In British Columbia the core of our health service – that which is provided by our health authorities – is a public system. Perhaps the most important reason why is so that we can keep public bodies accountable.

Trust in our democracy is built on transparency and accountability, which was vital during the pandemic. People were afraid, and justifiably so. COVID-19 was a real, new threat. People were required to comply with extraordinary measures and limitations, affecting their movement, interactions with family and loved ones, friends, co-workers and the public in general, as well as requirements under vaccine mandates. The public’s trust was critical to the success of the pandemic response.

Trust will always be essential in our health system – people access these services often when they are at their most vulnerable. But we cannot ask the people of British Columbia to trust their health system, or indeed any public service, as a matter of faith. For this reason, VCH’s core business, as a public health authority, is not just the provision of health services but rather the transparent and accountable provision of health services. Deprioritizing freedom of information is harmful to its core business, just as it would be for any public body.

Fortunately, this audit does not tell just one story. It also tells the story of a health authority that has recognized and is acting on the need for change. The data presented in the body of this audit demonstrates that by the third year of the study period, VCH improved its FIPPA compliance. The average number of days that VCH took to respond to a request decreased by half between 2021/22 and 2022/23. As noted above, VCH expanded payment options for application fees. Executive have recognized the importance of information management and FOI responses by bringing in a new FOI tracking system and planning for a new document management system. New processes have been put in place to escalate FOI matters to executive when necessary. I believe this shows VCH has recognized the need for a cultural change that required leadership from the top.

I hope that readers of this report take away both stories. The first is the story of how, in the face of an unprecedented crisis a public body might be tempted to retreat from transparency and accountability. But the second story is how VCH presents an example of an organization that has learned that becoming less transparent is harmful to the core business – both in the immediate term and in the long run – and decided to drive cultural change throughout the organization.

I would like to thank the leadership at VCH and its staff for participating in this audit, and for the OIPC staff that conducted it. I think it offers lessons that we can apply, not just for the next crisis, but every day.

To read the full report: https://www.oipc.bc.ca/documents/audit-reports/2859

To read the news release: https://www.oipc.bc.ca/documents/news-releases/2861

To view a video on the report: https://youtu.be/GoI45OlbSxM

To read the FIPPA and the application fee infographic: https://www.oipc.bc.ca/documents/infographics/2857

To read an overview of the report: https://www.oipc.bc.ca/documents/infographics/2860