Why boss of Royal Inland Hospital still lives in Kelowna

Last spring, not long after being sworn in as the minister of health for the new Christy Clark government, Mike de Jong went for a fly-about visiting B.C. hospitals.

His first stop was Kamloops. In a private meeting facilitated by former MLA Claude Richmond, de Jong sat down with some local physicians, including Dr. Sean Gorman, who heads up the RIH medical advisory committee, Dr. Keith Hutchison, chair of the IHA’s medical advisory committee, Dr. David Sanden, the chief of staff at RIH, and Dr. Steve Rollheiser, president of the RIH medical staff.

With Richmond and de Jong was Kamloops South MLA Kevin Krueger. They came bearing good news.

They could see to it, they said, that the next Interior Health Authority vice president of tertiary services — to which RIH administration reports — would live in Kamloops.

A backdrop to the offer was Joanne Konnert’s impending retirement from that position, and Mayor Peter Milobar’s very public disagreement with health authority CEO Dr. Robert Halpenny over where the job should be located.

Milobar’s battle with the IHA had begun a year earlier when he uttered his memorable “bullshit” expletive to describe the shift in administration from Kamloops to Kelowna.

The mayor demanded that Konnert’s position be moved to Kamloops. “If IHA wants me on board, that’s how they do it,” he declared in April of 2010.

Now, with Konnert leaving the post, that wish could be granted.

The reaction wasn’t what the political visitors were hoping for.

Actually, said the doctors, things were working out pretty well with Konnert handling things from Kelowna. They had a couple of reasons for that opinion.

For one, Konnert was doing a first-rate job. For another, having the position in Kelowna, the headquarters for the IHA, assured that the person in charge of RIH was in the know.

In other words, thanks but no thanks. Just get us someone as good as Konnert.

The politicians, rebuffed in their offer to go to the mat with IHA for the change, felt they’d had the rug pulled out from under them, if you’ll excuse the somewhat mixed metaphor.

They’d been hammered for the past 12 months by the public, the mayor and regional politicians over the issue of local control over the Kamloops hospital, figured they’d come up with a solution that would please everybody, and the doctors were sitting there telling them never mind.

They went away and the idea died on the vine.

But from the other side of the table, it was a question of putting the best interests of health care at RIH ahead of political considerations.

“The group said we needed a capable candidate, not a political appointment,” Gorman told me this week. The system was starting to work “and we just didn’t want to lose that momentum.”

Hutchison concurs. “Headquarters (of IHA), like it or not, is based in Kelowna.”

If all of IHA’s administration shifted to Kamloops, that would be a different matter. “I’d be all for that.”

The one thing they asked for was that Konnert’s successor not be from within the existing Kelowna gene pool. In June, IHA announced the hiring of Susan Brown from the Fraser Health Authority.

And that’s the previously unknown story of why Konnert’s replacement lives in Kelowna instead of Kamloops.