Inquiry into faulty Newfoundland testing starts Wednesday

The commission of inquiry into faulty hormone receptor testing at Eastern Health is scheduled to start Wednesday in St. John's after being postponed by poor weather.

The public inquiry, headed by Justice Margaret Cameron, will open with testimony from cancer patients and families of patients affected by the faulty breast-cancer-related tests.

The hormone receptor tests of 1,013 patients done between 1997 and 2005 are at issue in the inquiry. Of those patients, 322 had died by 2007.

On Tuesday, the day before the inquiry is scheduled to begin, the provincal government released new numbers showing that of the 322 patients who died, 108 had recieved inaccurate test results.

Hormone receptor tests are used to determine the course of treatment that a breast cancer patient will receive, including the drug Tamoxifen, which has been clinically shown to improve a patient's odds of survival.

People looking for answers to how the mistakes could have happened said this is a week they've been waiting for.

Minnie Hoyles was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998. A hormone receptor test came back negative, meaning she wasn't given Tamoxifen, a drug proven to increase survival rates for breast cancer patients. A retest in 2007 showed the first result to have been wrong.

Hoyles told CBC News she has wondered about how that could happen to her and hundreds of others, and she's anxious for the inquirry to begin.

Health professionals also concerned

She said it will be especially emotional for her and hundreds of others as the first few witnesses begin their testimony Wednesday, including family of cancer patients who have since died.

"Where these people are, is where I could've been," she said. "And, you know, but for the grace of God, I could've been right where they are."

Rob Ritter, executive director of the Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Association, told CBC News that health professionals are also trying to deal with the fallout from the incorrect hormone receptor tests.

"The physicians in the system, the nurses in the system, they're quite demoralized about what's going on," he said. "They come to work everyday to save lives and to alleviate pain. And believe me, when something averse happens, like what happened here, they feel pretty badly about it."

The association's president told CBC News he hopes the inquiry will get to the bottom of what went wrong in Eastern Health's pathology lab.

"I think the most important thing here is to make sure the system that resulted in the hormone receptor tests being found to be wrong … [gets] fixed, getting it thoroughly investigated to find out what systematic flaws were in place to allow this to happen in the first place," said Joe Tumilty.

He said the the public scandal of mistaken test results has made it harder to recruit much-needed pathologists to the region and he hopes the inquiry will help clear the air.

"The atmosphere and working conditions in the lab in St. John's, because of this inquiry, are going to be not optimal," Tumilty said.

"Pathology is already an area that's under-serviced in this province, by a long stretch, and the ability to attract and retain new pathologists to come and work in an environment where there's this much scrutiny is really going to be quite difficult."