KEY POINTS:
Hawkes Bay District Health Board chief executive Chris Clarke says he asked commissioner Sir John Anderson if he wanted him to stay in his job, but stopped short of directly offering to resign.
Mr Clarke faced questions from Parliament's health select committee yesterday over his role in the conflict of interest allegations that tore the board apart.
He went on stress leave just before Health Minister David Cunliffe sacked the board, citing the "irrevocable breakdown" in relations between the board and management.
Mr Clarke told the committee that when Sir John was appointed commissioner the two had a frank conversation about his future.
"I said to the commissioner: 'Sir John, we may need to have an adult-to-adult conversation. You may decide that my face is not the face you want to lead this organisation'."
Mr Clarke told reporters after the hearing he took Sir John's expression of confidence in the overall management of the board as one in himself.
But after the hearing Sir John was saying little about the meeting.
"We had an adult conversation about where we were going and we'll have more in the future," he told reporters. "I've only been there a month. We had our first meeting."
He said Mr Clarke had not offered to resign.
Mr Clarke acknowledged to the committee that management had failed at times to handle tender and contracting processes appropriately and he took criticism for that "on the chin".
Problems in those processes on both the board and management side came under the spotlight from the Auditor-General and an independent panel investigating the board's management of conflicts of interest.
Mr Clarke said important lessons had been learned and he was determined to lift the board's performance.
Mr Clarke was questioned at length by National MP Tony Ryall over managers allowing Healthcare New Zealand to see the text of aproposal for a community health contract worth up to $20 million a year earlier than its competitors and suggest alterations to the document.
Healthcare's managing director, Peter Hausmann, was later appointed by the Government to the health board.
Mr Ryall has repeatedly used parliamentary privilege to accuse Mr Clarke of colluding with Mr Hausmann over the documents to give Healthcare NZ favourable treatment.
But Mr Clarke said he had removed himself from that stage of the process because of a conflict of interest that involved the job of a family member.
He had trusted that other managers had handled the changes to the documents - ostensibly so Healthcare NZ could remove any of its intellectual property - appropriately.
Asked by Green MP Sue Kedgley if he should have raised concerns with the Auditor-General over some of the conflicts that were occurring at board level, he acknowledged he could have done more.
He said he had raised the matter repeatedly with the board, had sought independent advice for the board and put forward the idea of a governance manual, which the board had rejected.
Sir John told MPs he hoped a commissioner would not be needed at the board by the end of the year.
He said the board's financial and information technology systems were good and were not responsible for its ballooning deficit - projected to be $7 million this financial year - instead blaming recent wage settlements, particularly with nurses.
- NZPA
