William Osler’s Dr. Naveed Mohammad out as CEO after rocky relationship with Brampton Civic staff

Dr. Naveed Mohammad, who had a strained relationship with staff at Brampton Civic Hospital, is no longer president and CEO of William Osler Health System, after serving in the role for a little over a year-and-a-half. 

An email sent to all staff Monday by Geoffrey Ritchie, the chair of Osler’s board, obtained by The Pointer, announced the decision. 

“Today, Osler's Board of Directors is announcing that Dr. Naveed Mohammad will no longer serve as its President and CEO, effective immediately,” Ritchie wrote. 

A spokesperson for William Osler confirmed Mohammad is no longer in the role. “Osler is grateful for the dedication and support of its staff, physicians and volunteers, and for their commitment to continuing to meet the health care needs of the community,” Catalina Guran, senior manager of public relations, said.

William Osler oversees Brampton Civic Hospital, the only full-service hospital in the city. It also runs Peel Memorial Centre for Integrated Health and Wellness in Brampton and Etobicoke General Hospital in Toronto.

Its president and CEO oversees frontline hospital care for patients, many of whom endured alarming conditions inside Civic that have persisted for years. The city is home to more than 700,000 residents but has just one full-service hospital, which has been the epicentre of the hallway healthcare crisis in Ontario, with patients routinely treated in makeshift spaces.

Not long after the pandemic made conditions even worse, some staff began to speak out about the lack of resources, questioning leadership.

A William Osler physician who was acting as the head of critical care accused senior leadership of censoring him for making public remarks in 2020. Dr. Brooks Fallis, no longer with Osler, said he had an offer to become the permanent head of the intensive care department retracted after his public criticism of the Doug Ford government’s handling of the pandemic. Brampton was a national hotspot and experienced some of the worst COVID-19 impacts in the country. William Osler and the Province denied the allegations.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Fallis named Mohammad as a key figure in the decision. A letter sent to Fallis in November 2020 from Mohammad and Dr. Frank Martino, Osler's chief of staff, asked him to stop making public comments without first seeking permission from William Osler. Fallis said that, in a meeting, Mohammad said he had no desire to muzzle the intensive care physician. 

When the decision was made to leave Fallis off the list of candidates for the permanent position, almost two-dozen ICU doctors at Osler signed a letter to leadership, including Mohammad, stating Fallis should be given the role.

It was ignored and multiple sources told The Pointer that staff lost trust in Mohammad. 

Mohammad denied taking direction from the provincial government and Osler said the PCs did not interfere in the staffing decisions. 

Mohammad began serving as president and CEO of William Osler on April 14, 2020. The decision was announced in February of the same year after a search for candidates that spanned five months. He earned $427,957.61 in 2020, according to Ontario’s public sector salary disclosure list.

Dr. Martino preceded Mohammad as interim president and CEO, a role he resumed today (February 7) after Mohammad’s departure.

The exit of Mohammad has not been explained. It has not been confirmed if Mohammad resigned or was asked to leave his post by the board of directors.

The email to staff does not address why he is no longer in the role he was appointed to, nor why he served for such a short period. Guran’s statement on behalf of William Osler did not provide additional details. 

“He became President and CEO in April 2020, and has been our leader through this unprecedented time,” she wrote in an email.

William Osler’s website has already been updated to reflect the change. Martino is listed as the interim leader and all references to Mohammad have been scraped from its senior leadership page. His professional Twitter account, @drmohammadosler, also appears to have been deleted.

Dr. Mohammad appears in a holiday greeting message from William Osler.

(Screenshot from Facebook/William Osler)

A news release announcing Mohammad’s appointment in 2020 suggested he was a long-term appointment. “Many opportunities lie ahead as the organization continues to build and enhance partnerships locally and provincially to better meet the needs of the community,” Jane McMullan, then chair of the William Osler board, said in a release at the time. 

Mohammad presided over a complicated and fractious period for William Osler, particularly in Brampton. He ascended to the hospital network’s top job at the height of the pandemic’s first wave, with emergency care and testing facilities in Brampton stretched to the breaking point. 

During the first wave of the pandemic, Brampton significantly underprovided testing for its residents due to a lack of resources from the provincial government. With a concentration of essential frontline jobs, particularly in Canada’s supply chain, COVID-19 ripped through the local population. Testing resources, provided by the Province and organized by William Osler, were just a fraction of the per-capita resources other communities received, despite Brampton being a hot spot. The poor management, which Dr. Fallis spoke out against, hampered public health efforts to contain the viral spread while contact tracing resources in the city were also vastly under resourced.

During the first half of 2020, William Osler operated two testing facilities at its Etobicoke General Hospital: one drive-thru, one walk-up. It had one in Brampton. Officials, including Mayor Patrick Brown and Minister of Health Christine Elliott, refused to take responsibility for the crisis. Brown even tried to spin the figures suggesting that “our hospital” had the highest testing rates in Ontario, using statistics that included Etobicoke General. In fact, Brampton had among the worst testing rates. 

Mohammad did not correct the mayor and was often by his side at weekly pandemic updates, downplaying the worsening reality in Brampton. 

The Pointer sent numerous questions for the CEO throughout the pandemic that were not answered.

Communication with the public broke down under his leadership, as routine information and health network data that Trillium Health Partners in Mississauga provided, were not disclosed by Osler.

The Pointer’s leadership addressed concerns about the poor communication with senior staff at Osler, who said they were trying to be transparent, but there was little change. Even information about infection outbreaks within Osler’s facilities was difficult to obtain.

In September 2020, Mohammad refused to take responsibility for Brampton’s woeful testing levels. “Even though we are stepping up to do a lot of testing, our main responsibility is to care for the acute patient that shows up in our emergency department,” he said, failing to explain who would advocate for better testing resources, if the very system responsible for screening would not make it a priority.

Brampton lacked testing resources during the pandemic.

 (Image from Mufid Majnun/Unsplash)

As conditions at Brampton Civic grew worse, two high-profile deaths highlighted the lack of trust community members had in their own hospital. 

As of May 19, of last year a total of 1,125 had been transferred from Osler hospitals to help make room for severe COVID-positive patients. In one week, at the start of May, 2021, 139 patients were transferred away from Civic, more than any other hospital in Ontario.

Around the same time, Brampton resident Manmeen Oberoi lost her 36-year-old son, Harmandeep, after he was turned away from Civic and told to rest at home.

Thirteen-year-old Emily Victoria Viegas also died last year, due to COVID complications, after her father feared taking her to Civic because of overcrowding.

Mohammad came under fire but maintained that Osler was doing an exemplary job, despite ongoing problems throughout the pandemic. 

In the first week of 2022, when Osler had to declare a “code orange” because it could no longer handle new admissions due to over-capacity, he released a statement:

“This move will enable us to continue to provide high-quality care to our patients, and we are grateful to our staff, physicians and volunteers who have moved swiftly to enact our Code Orange policy and procedures,” he said.

The former president and CEO also led William Osler during the ongoing struggle for a badly needed second hospital in Brampton. 

For more than a decade, Osler has been working on a long-term plan to convert Peel Memorial from an out-patient healthcare facility to a full-service hospital with an emergency department and acute care beds. Mohammad spoke to The Pointer about the project in 2020, before his promotion, unaware of the process that was supposed to be followed. 

Advocates, opposition parties and some Brampton councillors have been fiercely critical of how William Osler and the Progressive Conservative government have handled the project. It was announced last year that an expansion of Peel Memorial would go ahead—but that Brampton would receive 250 new beds, not the 850 council demanded when it declared a healthcare emergency in 2020. Only a handful of the 250 beds will be for acute care and Mohammad failed to provide details of what Brampton would be getting, despite asking the city’s taxpayers to cover the local cost of the project.

After a presentation late last year to the City, Councillor Jeff Bowman demanded a proper public meeting about the expansion so taxpayers could find out what they were being asked by Osler to pay for. 

Instead of the meeting that was requested, Osler, under Mohammad’s leadership, only put on a general healthcare townhall in December, which did not address the many questions about Peel Memorial that are still unanswered.

Civic is Brampton’s only full service hospital.

(Image from The Pointer files)

“We asked for 850 beds in that motion and we're getting 250 beds in seven years?” Bowman said late last year, after hearing a vague presentation by Mohammad about Peel Memorial’s expansion. He was referencing the healthcare emergency the City of Brampton declared in January 2020, demanding its fair share of funding. 

Before the 250 beds were announced, Chris Bejnar, co-founder of Citizens For a Better Brampton, met with Osler officials and confirmed the phase-2 expansion will not turn Memorial into an actual hospital upon its opening. The 250 beds, he was told, will be for ambulatory care, chronic care and mental health care, with the possibility of 100 acute-care beds years after phase 2 opens.

None of these ongoing issues are mentioned in the email sent by Ritchie, the chair of Osler’s board, announcing that Mohammad is no longer the CEO. The message Monday confirms to staff that Martino will resume the role of interim president and CEO.

The email notes recovering from the pandemic, supporting staff and planning “redevelopment projects” as areas the hospital network will focus on.

“We recognize this comes at a challenging period for the hospital,” Ritchie wrote. “Dr. Frank Martino, Osler's Chief of Staff, has been appointed as Interim President and CEO to lead the organization through the time ahead.”

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