Hospital board meets again in closed session

The Franklin Foundation Hospital Board of Commissioners met Thursday behind closed doors in an executive session at the Baldwin Community Center for what their posted agenda referred to as “strategic planning purposes.”
The majority of the meeting was closed to the public, and the press and board members are legally prohibited from disclosing what was discussed, but one community member who is familiar with the issues the hospital is dealing with was willing to speak to the Banner-Tribune.
St. Mary Parish President-elect David Hanagriff said the meeting was less about strategic planning and more about internal conflict within the hospital’s governing board and administration.
“Yet again there is a cloak of mystery,” Hanagriff said. “People are not informed and we don’t know what’s going on. It’s the same situation. They call these meetings and then they go into executive session. There is a mediator here so they are here to mediate something. But we don’t know what it is because they don’t tell us. Time and time again this board has been hiding under this strategic planning clause. This is just a way to keep the public out so we don’t know what’s going on and it’s the same situation. This is a public institution and it’s a public board. The public wants to be informed and the public needs to be informed and yet again this board is doing the same thing.”
At one point, before the meeting started, Hanagriff was addressed by a board member who asked him why he was attending the meeting. Hanagriff responded that the meeting was public and he had a right to be present.
After a moment had passed, Hanagriff asked board member Clegg Caffery Jr. if he would prefer that he not attend the meeting and Caffery responded that he indeed would prefer Hanagriff not be present. It was not immediately clear why Caffery preferred the parish president-elect not be at the public meeting. Hanagriff responded to Caffery saying he was within his rights to stay until the board went into executive session.
Dr. Brent Allain said in an interview that he was given notice of the Thursday session which was supposed to include the medical staff, “But I opened it up and it didn’t have anything about medical staff” on the agenda call, listed as “strategic planning.”
“We’re going by our by-laws,” Allain said.
Allain was referring to an apparent dispute between the medical staff and the hospital board over the chief of staff’s position.
The medical staff, which operates by its own set of by-laws, appointed Dr. Donna Tesi as chief of staff. During October’s meeting, a scheduled item on the agenda was not discussed by the board in their regular session. Under “New Business” on the agenda was an item to affirm action on the Chief of Staff. It was not immediately clear what the proposed action was but after a lengthy executive session the item was dismissed by the board.
According to Franklin Foundation Hospital Board Chairman Eugene Foulcard, the item will not be coming up again. “We didn’t take any action on that,” Foulcard said. “And we are not going to take any action on it in the future.”
Allain said Tesi is chief of staff as far as the medical staff is concerned.