Northern Health hit with court order after failing to respond to request about care home conditions

B.C.'s privacy watchdog has taken the unusual step of issuing a court order compelling the province's Northern Health Authority to respond to freedom of information requests about the conditions at a long-term care facility it operates in Fort St. John, B.C.

Caroline Alexander says she made the requests as a member of the resident and family council at the Peace Villa, the only long-term care facility in the city of approximately 21,000 people in northeastern B.C.

Councils are meant to advocate for residents and families at care facilities and work with operators to make improvements.

Over the years, the Peace Villa council says it has heard and observed issues that include rooms being too cold for residents and a lack of snacks between meals.

But Alexander says they've largely been stonewalled when trying to seek information about how the decisions leading to these outcomes are being made, which is why she filed the freedom of information requests seeking internal documents and emails about the facility earlier this year.

"We kept coming up against these very large brick walls, and we weren't able to get answers about very basic care standards," she said.

By law, public bodies, including health authorities, need to respond to freedom of information requests within a set timeline, which Northern Health failed to do.

Alexander says she then went to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, which can step in to make sure requests are being complied with.

Commissioner Michael Harvey says it's not unusual for his office to need to remind organizations of their deadlines, but, generally speaking, after that reminder, a timeline is set and the request is dealt with.

In the case of Northern Health, however, he says the deadline came and went with no sign of a response, which is why he filed an order in B.C. Supreme Court on April 28, forcing the health authority to act.

"Our concern here is when public bodies just are not seeming to take these deadlines seriously," he said. "This is not voluntary. This is something that needs to be complied with."

In a statement, Northern Health said it is taking the request seriously and admitted it has failed to comply with the deadlines set out under law.

It also said it takes seriously any concerns about treatment at its facilities and seeks to work "collaboratively with resident and family councils," including those at the Peace Villa, to resolve potential problems.

As for the freedom of information requests, Northern Health's statement blamed the delays on "capacity issues" that have impacted its ability to respond to information requests and said it is "making every effort to expedite their completion."

Harvey says Northern Health is not alone in being slow to respond, citing an audit conducted last year on Vancouver Coastal Health, which found that the health authority responded to fewer than one-quarter of requests within the 30-day timeline.

He said that while he is sympathetic to the constraints these organizations face, they also need to treat sharing information publicly as one of their core duties, as required by provincial law.

"Our freedom of information rights are ... a cornerstone of our democracy," he said. "They're one of the ways in which we expect our public bodies to be transparent and accountable to the people in the province."

Failing to live up to those obligations, he said, could result in people "starting to lose trust in our health services."

Alexander says she's grateful her concerns are being taken seriously, and she hopes to get the information she is looking for soon.

"I'm just looking for accountability," she said. "We just want what is rightfully deserved by the residents of this villa and their families.