Provincial supervisor appointed to run Brentwood Recovery Home
Concerns over management culture cited as board of directors dissolved
A provincially-appointed supervisor has taken the reins at Brentwood Recovery Home and dissolved its board of directors after an investigation led to “concerns regarding governance, management and culture” at the addiction facility.
“This really is about modernizing governance, strengthening the organization and establishing processes to address client complaints and concerns,” said Mark Walton, who was appointed Brentwood’s supervisor on March 2.
Walton stressed Brentwood, which receives a large chunk of its annual $3-million budget through provincial funding, will continue to accept new referrals. Client care will not be affected, he said.
The move to disband Brentwood’s board and call in a supervisor followed a “joint operational review” led by Ken Deane, the former CEO of Hotel-dieu Grace Healthcare, that started in the fall of 2019 and finished in January.
“What had come up was a series of issues where people had submitted complaints and they weren’t convinced that they had necessarily gone through the appropriate mechanisms and didn’t get full follow through,” said Walton. “By that I mean they didn’t get the full response they were expecting from the board.”
Walton said he still wasn’t familiar with the exact details of all the complaints. He did say they were not related to financial issues.
“My understanding is the issues that were identified had to do with culture, had to do with issues related to communication with patients and families,” said Walton. “But anything more specific than that I’m not familiar with at this time.”
“And I would say that anything more specific would actually be protected under the Privacy Act, so I’m not sure that I would be able to share that.”
He said the concern is not necessarily that there were complaints, which are “a natural course of the therapeutic process,” but how they were handled.
“What we wanted to make sure was that there was a process in place to make sure those are addressed objectively and with full transparency.”
Walton expects to be working with Brentwood for several months.
“But the idea here is to get it back on its feet so we can transition back to another board structure and turn it back over to the community it serves,” he said.
Brentwood agreed to the initial operational review, according to a report by Bruce Lauckner, the Transitional Regional Lead in West Ontario and the CEO of several LHINS including Erie St. Clair.
“This was put in place in order to provide a careful examination of concerns regarding the governance, management and culture at Brentwood,” Lauckner wrote in the report.
Walton said the former board members will be “engaged” as that process plays out.
“They contributed a great deal of time and their expertise,” he said. “But when a supervisor comes in it is a necessary step that that supervisor takes on both the role of the board and the executive director. That is largely to help facilitate a rapid implementation of new initiatives. So they have been dissolved, but it is actually a natural part of the supervisor process and not a reflection on the board and its contributions.”
Despite that, Walton said a priority going forward will be updating how Brentwood is governed.
“What really prompted this and what brought me into the mix was that when we looked at the governance structure of Brentwood there was really a need to modernize it,” he said. “It was a governance structure that had been in place for quite some time. But it was largely populated with alumni of the program, and we needed to make sure there was independence brought into that as well.”
Brentwood, one of the largest and best-known addiction-treatment facilities in Southwestern Ontario, has had essentially the same governance model since it began. The centre’s roots stretch back to 1964 when Father Paul Charbonneau, along with Jim and Kay Ryan, founded Charity House, which later became the Brentwood Recovery Home. Since then, more than 25,000 people have graduated from Brentwood. About 300 people a year enrol in its 90-day program.
“What we’re really talking about here, based on what came out of the operational review, is to focus on its strategy, focus on its governance and to make sure it is well positioned for the future in terms of the care that it is providing,” said Walton.