Eastern Health memo describes cancer advocates as bullies

Two well-known St. John's cancer advocates say they were stunned to see themselves likened to schoolyard bullies in an internal Eastern Health memo that attacked their credibility.

A May 2007 memo by Susan Bonnell, then Eastern Health's director of strategic communications, urged senior officials to speak publicly about errors at the authority's pathology lab, as "the media look for less credible spokespeople."

In a memo marked private and confidential and distributed to former chief executive officer George Tilley and two other senior executives, Bonnell said journalists were relying on people with suspect motives.

"Two things happen when you don't stand up to bad press … the public automatically assumes that there is a good reason why you are being quiet and there must be something to the allegations," Bonnell wrote.

"And (2) just like the schoolyard bullies, an individual with an axe to grind feels uninhibited and will keep digging and digging."

Bonnell identified three people as having credibility issues: Peter Dawe, the executive director of the Newfoundland and Labrador division of the Canadian Cancer Society; documentary filmmaker and patient advocate Gerry Rogers; and Ches Crosbie, a St. John's lawyer who at the time was arguing for certification of a class action lawsuit.

"I was shocked when I saw this," said Rogers, who made the internationally acclaimed documentary My Left Breast in 2001 about her ordeal with cancer.

Bonnell's memo was introduced as an exhibit while Rogers was testifying Tuesday afternoon at a judicial inquiry examining how the St. John's pathology lab came to produce hundreds of inaccurate lab results.

"I'm not a schoolyard bully. I'm somebody who cares. Everybody in this room cares, and everybody at Eastern Health cares, but they messed up," Rogers said.

"What kind of rabbit hole have I fallen into where it's all topsy-turvy and we're the bad guys?"

Memo preceded apology over confusion

Bonnell wrote the memo following revelations in court documents that Eastern Health officials were aware that the error rate involving hundreds of retested hormone receptor samples was several times higher than officials had claimed the preceding December.

Two days after Bonnell wrote her May 16, 2007, memo, Tilley held a news conference, apologizing for not having revealed more details earlier, and for the confusion in the public eye.

A political furor erupted over revelations in the court documents, which included an affidavit signed by an Eastern Health executive, and which were attached to Crosbie's class action suit.

Days later, the Newfoundland and Labrador government announced the judicial inquiry that began hearing evidence last week.

Bonnell's memo said Eastern Health should not engage in what she called a "numbers game" over the number of retested cases and the error rates of "negatively impacted" patients.

'I was doing my job': cancer advocate

Bonnell criticized Dawe for his statements at the time that she said left "the general public with the impression that there are a 'new' group of women.

"There's a new level of fear and anxiety that Peter Dawe is creating and then blaming us for," Bonnell said in her memo, written one day after CBC News reported on an affidavit that revealed the error rate of hormone receptor tests was several times higher than Eastern Health had admitted.

Dawe told CBC News Wednesday that he was just speaking out for patients who were not getting answers about potential errors with their treatment.

"It was very stark, the language in the memo," Dawe said in an interview.

"My first response was that I was doing my job," he said. "The facts came out very slowly, and that's what led to … a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety."

'Shooting the messenger'

Dawe told reporters Tuesday afternoon that the memo seemed like "a case of shooting the messenger taken to an extreme. You hope that it's not indicative of a deeper cultural problem within their organization."

The inquiry, by Justice Margaret Cameron, is examining how hundreds of breast cancer patients received inaccurate hormone receptor test results between 1997 and 2005, when Eastern Health disclosed problems with its pathology lab.

The tests are done to help determine the appropriate course of treatment a patient should receive. False negatives wrongly excluded many patients from receiving an antihormonal therapy like Tamoxifen, which many oncologists prescribe to improve a patient's chances of survival.

Cameron has so far heard that 108 of the patients who received inaccurate results have died.