An

alternative to No Comment

On January 12, 2016, the Independent Committee of Inquiry into the situation of
clinical faculty at the Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University and the Department
of Medicine at Capital District Health Authority released its final report. To date
(February 21, 2016), there has been no response from the University to inquiries
from the media and no statement on the report issued by the University. As a
member of the University community, I find this deeply troubling serious harms to
individual faculty members were identified and serious deficiencies in our
institutional policies and practices were exposed.

As a counterbalance to the public relations and legal advice that the Administration
may have received, I offer an alternative to the current No Comment.

We wish to thank Dr. Allan Sharp and Dr. Bernice Schrank for their Report of
the Independent Committee of Inquiry into the Situations of Drs. Gabrielle
Horne, Michael Goodyear, and Bassam A. Nassar at the Capital District Health
Authority & Dalhousie University. We also wish to acknowledge the
contributions of the late Dr. Sackett to the work of the Committee. The
Dalhousie Community is fortunate that these individuals were willing to give
their time and considerable expertise to investigate, reflect upon, and make
recommendations for reform arising from the three cases that were put to
them.

Of course we have not yet had time to fully digest the content of the 257-page
report and so it is not possible to issue a lengthy response. However, it is
imperative that we make some things very clear right away.

We take very seriously the conclusions drawn by the Committee, not least
that there was a systemic failure of bylaws, policy, process and academic
administrative culture and that the available policies and procedures failed
to recognize and defend the importance of academic freedom in academic
medical environments.

We cannot immediately specify precisely how we will respond to any failures
and ensure that any necessary corrections are made. However, we can and
must immediately express our commitment to procedural fairness, natural
justice, and academic freedom for academic physicians at Dalhousie. We
acknowledge that, as an institution, we owe our employees procedural
fairness and natural justice and that, as a University, we have a duty to
defend the academic freedom of our faculty members and to ensure the
ethical conduct of research.

In the coming months, we will design and implement a process through
which to review our policies, practices, procedures, and culture in relation to

academic physicians, make necessary changes, and share the lessons learned
with the broader Canadian academic medical community.

A simple statement that acknowledges problems from the past and expresses a
commitment to work to ensure that we do better in the future. Is that too much to
ask?