Confidentiality Remains Issue for New Hospital Board

During a lively campaign this fall, three candidates for the South Bay Hospital District’s governing board took incumbents to task for being closemouthed and keeping the public in the dark.

The three emerged victorious to become the board’s new majority--but now they face a public access issue of their own. The new members must decide whether to follow the lead of earlier board members by signing confidentiality agreements, which would bar them from revealing certain information about the 208-bed South Bay Hospital in Redondo Beach.

The agreements were crafted to shield information given to the board as part of the hospital’s request for up to $15 million in public money. The hospital--publicly owned but run by American Medical International, a for-profit chain--wants the funds to pay for renovation projects and to offset medical bills of uninsured patients.

AMI wants to keep certain information confidential to prevent rival health care providers from learning too much about its business. However, two of the hospital board’s new members say they are reluctant to sign such pacts.

“We’re hesitating, because if we do sign it, it makes us incommunicado,” said Dr. Gerald Looney, who joined the five-member board Dec. 8 along with two other new members, Dick Fruin and Aviva Kamin.

Fruin, whom the board has tapped as its new president, said last week that he had not yet signed a confidentiality agreement. “I just feel uncomfortable with it,” he said.

Kamin said she did not know enough about the confidentiality agreements to comment.

The new board members’ public-versus-private dilemma dramatizes the complex relationship between the district and its for-profit hospital managers. If the new board members fail to sign the confidentiality pacts, they will not get access to material given to other board members, the district’s lawyer, Robert Lundy, said.

Asked for copies of the confidentiality agreements, the hospital district released one such pact that the district signed with the hospital in March, 1991. However, the district declined to provide copies of confidentiality pacts signed by individual board members, asserting that the agreements themselves are confidential.