No regrets over how cancer case was handled, former minister says

Amid sharp questioning at Newfoundland and Labrador's judicial inquiry into flawed lab testing, a former health minister read a plaintive statement Tuesday directly aimed at breast cancer patients.

John Ottenheimer, who was grilled with sharp questions at the inquiry about what he could not remember and what he did not do while health minister in 2005 and 2006, told reporters after he concluded several days of testimony that he had no regrets about his time running the health department.

Before finishing his time on the stand, Ottenheimer asked for permission to read a two-minute statement that emphasized how he had relied on the "best professional and expert medical advice available" to him.

Asked by reporters after his testimony whether he had regrets over how he handled the cancer testing issue, Ottenheimer replied, "Not at all."

Although Ottenheimer said he had wished that information had come out earlier, he would not criticize Eastern Health, the government-appointed authority that runs the lab.

"Based on the professional medical expertise, that I received as the minister of the day, I would not have done anything differently," he told reporters.

Ottenheimer had testified he wanted to take the issue about problems with hormone receptor testing public in July 2005, but deferred to advice from Eastern Health.

"To the patients and to the families who have been directly impacted in your personal lives, my thoughts and my prayers are with you," Ottenheimer said in a low-key voice, describing how he hoped Canadians and even international jurisdictions may benefit from the inquiry's investigation into what he called "this most tragic event."

Hundreds excluded from antihormonal therapy

The inquiry is investigating how a pathology lab in St. John's produced inaccurate results for more than 300 breast cancer patients between 1997 and 2005, when hormone receptor testing was temporarily halted and retesting began on thousands of samples.

Hormone receptor tests are used to help determine the best course of treatment for breast cancer patients. The wrong results excluded them from consideration for the antihormonal therapy Tamoxifen.

Ottenheimer drew increasingly heated questions from inquiry co-counsel Bern Coffey during more than two days on the stand, particularly concerning the weeks and months following the first briefing Ottenheimer received on the issue.

Ottenheimer had not been fully briefed on what senior civil servants showed, and despite his early wishes to take the matter public, did little to push officials to do so in the subsequent months.

Did not raise matter at cabinet: Ottenheimer

On Tuesday, Coffey asked Ottenheimer about two external reviews that flagged significant problems at the pathology lab, and why Ottenheimer did not mention them to his cabinet colleagues during a meeting in 2007, just days before government announced an inquiry.

"It was an issue that I would leave to the minister of the day in his capacity as minister of health and community services, to allow him to conduct his role in accordance with his wishes," Ottenheimer testified.

Tom Osborne, who succeeded Ottenheimer in the health portfolio in March 2006, began testifying on Tuesday.

He told the inquiry that the issue of faulty tests came across his desk in his first week on the job as health minister.

"My early weeks — for that matter, my early months — in the department of health and community services, I had a great deal of information that I was required to absorb and understand, and that did not stand out at that particular time to me as something would have been alarming, no," he said.

Osborne said that he was led to understand that Eastern Health was handling problems with the lab.

However, Osborne said he took responsibility for not having asked to see external reports that cited serious deficiencies at the lab.

"I'm not going to give you an excuse" for that, Osborne said.