He told the recent hospitals' advisory committee meeting in Dunedin the reports made it hard to understand where there were areas of concern.
Southern was one district health board, but it had two major hospitals within it and he needed to be able to see how each hospital was performing.
Mr Thomson said the committee had not seen a report from the Otago chief medical officer Richard Bunton for "quite some time" and reports from his Southland counterpart David Tulloch took "brevity to a new level". (In the agenda in question, Mr Tulloch's report was three and a-half lines long, although he was present to elaborate.)
Mr Thomson said he was a board member on several organisations, including commercial bodies, and it was not possible to govern without understanding the business involved.
If something went wrong within the organisation, the blame would be sheeted back to the governance level, and he had "personal experience of that".
(He was referring to Health Minister Tony Ryall sacking him as chairman of the previous Otago board as an accountability measure following the $16.9 million fraud of the board by a former staff member and his associate.)
The National Health Board, in its recent assessment of systems at Dunedin Hospital, was critical of uninterpreted data provided to board and committee members and it also questioned whether the roles of governance and management were clearly defined.
Committee chairman Paul Menzies indicated the NHB wanted more reporting on the whole of the board's performance.
Mr Thomson said he "didn't really care what the NHB might think" as it was not the governor of "this organisation".
One of the reports he criticised was that of Otago's diagnostic and support services where it was mentioned that waiting times for MRI and CT scans were being closely monitored but there was no information about waiting times as there had been in earlier reports.
Otago chief operating officer Vivian Blake said management may have "gone a little too far" with some reports.
It was agreed that Mr Thomson and any other members discuss the issue "off-line" with Mrs Blake to determine what was required.
• At the full board meeting the following day, chairman Joe Butterfield told members making changes in board papers was an ongoing process and in February or March the board needed to take stock of the situation.
Everybody knew his views about " thick" board papers, something which he had been concerned about when he began as chairman last year.
However, members had to have enough information to make sure they could govern and anyone with concerns should be raising that with the relevant committee chairmen.
Getting the right balance was not an easy task, he said.
