Reviewing N.B. medical tests 'a logistical nightmare'

Reviewing 15,000 medical tests from the Miramichi region of New Brunswick will likely require help from doctors outside the region, says a Charlottetown pathologist.

'In general, slides tend to retain their staining characteristics fairly well.' — Dr. Rosemary Henderson

The Miramichi Regional Health Authority announced on Monday that the biopsies, taken over a 12-year period, will be audited. An independent review of 227 cases from 2004-05 found that 18 per cent of the cases had incomplete results and three per cent were misdiagnosed.

Dr. Rosemary Henderson, a pathologist at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown, was part of that initial review, and is now helping with the audit of the other cases. Henderson told CBC News on Thursday that reviewing tests more than a decade old is possible, but organizing the review of thousands of tests is difficult.

"It is truly a logistical nightmare," said Henderson.

"It's possible to do because the hospital has stored all of their slides and the paraffin blocks, which are the blocks that contain the residuum of the tissue that hasn't been actually placed on the slides.… In general slides tend to retain their staining characteristics fairly well and many times are perfectly interpretable many years after the event."

Henderson said there aren't enough pathologists in the Atlantic region to complete all the work in a timely fashion.

A pathologist is a physician who specializes in diagnosing diseases by examining tissue, blood and body fluids in a laboratory.

The New Brunswick Health Department is considering hiring a group of pathologists from outside the region to help with the task.

The health authority said about 15,000 tests, most of them conducted at Miramichi Regional Hospital between 1995 and 2007, need to be reassessed. They include, among other things, biopsies for several kinds of cancer.

Health authority officials have not named the former pathologist involved in the probe, but it is likely he is Dr. Rajgopal Menon, a pathologist at the Miramichi Regional Health Authority during the period in question.

Menon, 73, was suspended on Feb. 6, 2007, by the governing body for doctors in New Brunswick.