Eastern Health never sure on notifying patients, cancer probe told

The largest health authority in Newfoundland and Labrador had doubts about whether all of its patients had been told about flawed breast cancer test, even though it projected the opposite in public, an inquiry has been told.

Pat Pilgrim, a chief operating officer at Eastern Health, told Justice Margaret Cameron that Eastern Health officials were never sure that all breast cancer patients had been told about hormone receptor test samples that had been sent away for retesting.

Nonetheless, the authority assured the public that all patients had been contacted, to the point that Health Minister Ross Wiseman often insisted in the house of assembly in 2007 that that was the case.

Wiseman has already told the Cameron inquiry he later learned that he had been given inaccurate information.

On Wednesday, Pilgrim provided a view from the inside.

"There was never any 100 per cent feeling of assurance that we'd gotten every patient out there that needed to be retested," Pilgrim said.

Cameron, a justice on the Newfoundland Supreme Court of Appeal who has been hearing evidence on botched cancer tests since last March, personally questioned Pilgrim on the matter.

"But would you agree with me that in the public pronouncements from Eastern Health — beyond the very early stages — that that caveat was not there and people were led to believe that in fact everybody had been notified?" Cameron asked.

"Absolutely," Pilgrim replied.

"Looking back on this, we should have been letting it be known that we still didn't have 100 per cent confidence that we'd gotten everybody with the search that we had done."

Pilgrim said part of the problem was that some of the retested results were sent to doctors, but the information was being placed in medical charts, without the patients being contacted directly.

As well, the inquiry has already been told about how various hospitals and authorities have had different filing systems. A breast cancer patient database was not completed until this year.

The ability to contact patients, meanwhile, remains a concern, as there is still no unified, province-wide database of patient information.

The Cameron inquiry was struck to determine how hundreds of breast cancer patients came to receive inaccurate results on estrogen receptor and progesterone receptor tests, which are used to help determine whether a patient can benefit from potentially life-saving antihormonal treatment.