New Hampshire’s five-member Executive Council will be asked on Aug. 24 to approve a contract handing Dartmouth-Hitchcock the reins of New Hampshire Hospital’s staffing for the next three years.

Members of the Executive Council – two of whom are running for governor – have a decision to make.

Let’s hope they have more information at their disposal than the public does about staffing levels at the state-run psychiatric hospital.

Two news organizations – InDepthNH.org and the New Hampshire Union Leader – have asked for and been denied information about staffing at the hospital after a Nashua woman who had been a patient at the facility jumped to her death on July 27 on the city’s Main Street.

It’s an issue not only because a woman died, but because when Dartmouth-Hitchcock took over staffing at the hospital less than a month earlier, 11 mental health practitioners quit in a dispute over compensation.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock claims it has provided adequate coverage since then, and the state maintains that the provider has met the terms of its contract with the state.

Unfortunately, neither the state nor D-H has provided specific information to back that up.

We think the public interest – and confidence – would be best served by making that staffing information public.

State officials wouldn’t say when the woman who jumped to her death had been a patient at NHH or when she had been released relative to when she died, but the New Hampshire Sunday News cited an unnamed NHH source who said the woman had been discharged just hours before her death.

"She had been in the hospital numerous times within several months leading up to this event, and then on that day was brought in again to the (new 10-bed crisis unit), admitted and discharged within a matter of hours," the woman told the Union Leader’s David Solomon. "That’s just unacceptable. I don’t want this to happen anymore."

Neither does anyone else.

Maybe it’s all just coincidence and bad timing: A new provider takes over at NHH; several practitioners quit in a labor dispute with that provider; a woman who comes in for treatment a few weeks later is released that same day and jumps to her death hours later.

Maybe there was nothing anyone could have done.

But before the state gives a contract to allow Dartmouth-Hitchcock to staff the hospital for the next three years, the public should get some answers that might shed some light on whether the public interest is being served – and will be going forward. Staffing levels would be a good place to start.

Gov. Maggie Hassan wants to be your U.S. senator, but the mess she has on her hands makes it clear that Hassan still has some heavy lifting to do as governor. We hope she’s up to the task.

Executive Councilors Chris Sununu and Colin Van Ostern – who both voted for the Dartmouth-Hitchcock contract – want to be the state’s next governor.

How these candidates respond to this crisis in the coming weeks will say a lot about their commitment to transparency, accountability and willingness to stand up for the public interest.