St George's Hospital Trust Board-A Secret Society ?

Do you know how your hospital is governed ? You pay for it out of your taxes and the hospital
spends nearly £400 million of your money. Do you have any say in how this money is spent ? You bet your life you don’t.
St George’s is governed by an unelected Trust Board consisting of full time employees and appointed directors. Even the Chair of the Hospital Trust is appointed. There is not one patient or member of the public on St George’s Trust Board-and neither is there any staff epresentation.
The Trust Board is a bit like a secret society.There are five appointed Non Executive directors who supposedly ‘represent’ the public although we have no say in choosing them. The rest of the board is made up of directors of varying departments, Finance, Nursing, Human Resources,
Strategy, Estates and Facilities etc.
As is the latest fashion the job titles are constantly changing, although the job remains pretty much the same. If you want to find out anything about the Trust Board management-don’t
bother. Information about the various non executive directors, your representatives, use to be available on St George’s website but that has been taken off, ’pending an update’ we are told.
Even the Trust Board meetings, which take place every two months, are secretive.
There are two parts, a closed session, to which the public are excluded, and an open session
In the good old days you at least use to know what was being discussed in the secret session, now you don’t even know that.
Some months ago, after questions from the public at a Trust Board meeting about why some issues were included in the secret session-the Trust Board responded by making
the contents of the secret session –secret.
That is one way of doing it.Wouldn’t it be better to just be more open