Forgot to tell minister about cancer test details, ex-deputy says

A former Newfoundland and Labrador deputy health minister has taken responsibility for not sharing important information about flawed cancer tests with the minister.

John Abbott, testifying in St. John's at the Cameron inquiry on flawed hormone receptor testing, said Monday he did not intentionally keep Tom Osborne out of the loop in 2006.

In August of that year, the Health Department prepared a briefing note for Premier Danny Williams on retested samples of breast cancer patients.

Osborne told the inquiry last month how he was overcome with anger in May 2007 when — then serving as justice minister — he saw that memo for the first time.

Abbott said it was a mistake that can be traced back to him forgetting to pass the information on to Osborne during a hectic period in which both men were travelling. 

"Literally, this just got left in my e-mail and not referred on to him," Abbott told Justice Margaret Cameron.

"Then the next week went on, I had literally, completely forgotten about that and about doing that, and I didn't realize that that had not been done, literally, until May 2007."

Osborne told the inquiry that he felt he could have done more in 2006 if he had been fully informed.

Osborne testified that he felt Eastern Health was downplaying the lab mistakes, not only in the public eye but even behind the scenes, to his own officials.

Osborne said the August 2006 briefing provided a more complete picture, and detailed how retesting showed that hundreds of patients had been given inaccurate results for hormone receptor tests, which determine whether a patient can benefit from the antihormonal therapy Tamoxifen.

As for Williams, he said last month that he viewed the memo merely as an update that did not contain much new information, and did not realize the importance of tables of data included in it. The summary of that memo does not refer to the hundreds of erroneous tests.

Williams also said that he would have relied on his minister to point out something that important.

After the Osborne memo incident, government changed its protocol on briefing notes. Since then, ministers must sign off on any official notes leaving their departments.

The breast cancer testing issue ignited in May 2007, when CBC News reported on documents registered with Newfoundland Supreme Court over a class action lawsuit. An affidavit showed that Eastern Health had known the error rate of a large number of retested samples was several times higher than it had disclosed only months earlier.

Meanwhile, Abbott testified that the Health Department had wanted Eastern Health to go public with what it knew about the flawed tests.

For instance, Abbott said he and John Ottenheimer favoured making the issue public in 2005, when Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto began retesting samples. However, they deferred to Eastern Health and its then chief executive officer, George Tilley.

Abbott said even though the retesting process turned out to be much slower than anticipated, he said he was assured things were in hand.

"I think the tenor was, you know, it's going reasonably well," he said.