ALTHOUGH THEY ONCE got all their revenue from patients or their insurers, Ontario’s public hospitals have since 1969 been financed entirely through the Ontario Health Insurance Plan and governed by the Public Hospitals Act, which gives wide powers to the Province.

However, their situation is significantly different from other public institutions such as elementary and secondary schools and in the health-care area, dramatically different from that of publicly owned facilities such as our own Dufferin Oaks.

In recognition of the fact they are publicly financed, our schools are staffed and operated under the supervision of publicly elected school boards, and similarly, county homes for the aged are owned, staffed and operated by the counties through elected county councils.

Not so our public hospitals, which often are owned and operated by religious bodies or charitable organizations, and these days are staffed and operated in much the same way as private corporations, by boards of directors that at least hypothetically supervise the hospital administrations.

Locally, Dufferin County had no hospital of any kind until Orangeville’s Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE) began fund-raising about 100 years ago for the purchase of

home at the corner of First and McCarthy streets that they named Lord Dufferin Hospital in honour of the same former Governor General whose name was picked for the county in 1881.

The Orangeville hospital, which opened in 1912, was initially run by the IODE, which tried unsuccessfully to have it take over by the county. It wasn’t until 1954, on completion of a new South Wing that raised the hospital’s capacity to 84 beds, that the IODE surrendered their charter, allowing for the creation of a more broadly based community hospital board, which was reflected in the renaming of the institution as Dufferin Area Hospital.

Another major addition was completed in 1962, increasing the number of beds to 123.

It wasn’t until after the Second World War that Dufferin’s farming community started to push for the county to have less expensive alternative to the county’s lone acute care hospital. In 1950, the Dufferin Federation of Agriculture set up a committee to determine the feasibility of establishing a care facility in Shelburne, and within a few months the local fundraising activity allowed the purchase of the former home of the late R. W. Brett, and its opening as the 14- bed Shelburne District Co-operative Nursing Centre, which boasted fees much lower than those in most hospitals — $5 a day for a bed in the main ward, $10 daily for use of the delivery room and $10 for use of the operating room.

In 1954, the hospital board won provincial recognition as a public hospital and the name was changed to Shelburne District Hospital. Seven years later, thanks in part to Shelburne council’s donation of local parkland, construction began on a splendid twostorey hospital with a 30-bed capacity, which opened officially in June 1962. Although it was expanded in 1970, the hospital later lost its emergency department and in 1993 merged with Dufferin Area Hospital through creation of the Dufferin-Caledon Health Care Corporation, with one hospital board, a single medical staff and all services being consolidated.

Completion in 1997 of the spacious new Headwaters Health Care Centre, on land Orangeville annexed from Caledon, led to a new role for the Shelburne hospital, then dubbed the “Shelburne campus” of Headwaters.

But despite all those changes, one constant was the existence of a form of representative government, with the municipalities whose residents were served by the hospitals being able to appoint representatives on the hospital board of directors.

That, unfortunately, is no longer the case, Headwaters having taken advantage of an obscure provision in the Public Hospitals Act, Section 12(4), which states: Despite the Corporations Act, a hospital may provide by by-law for the election and retirement of directors in rotation, but in that case no director shall be elected for a term of more than five years and at least four directors shall retire from office each year.”

Nowhere in the Act is there any requirement that a hospital board include representatives of the municipalities in the area it serves.

So it was that when the Headwaters administration decided to close the Shelburne facility, that decision went to a board of directors that for nearly year had neither any representative from any of the local municipalities nor anyone who lived in Shelburne, Melancthon, Amaranth, East Garafraxa or East Luther Grand Valley!

Surely the Public Hospitals Act should be amended to require all hospital boards to have at least one representative from each of the local municipalities served by the hospital, as well as an appointee from the local upper-tier government(s).

At least then our elected councillors could insist on being kept informed on issues the local hospital faces and how it intends to deal with them.