ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — Health Minister John Haggie says he will check with the province’s cancer care centre to try to find an update on hundreds of cancer patients who received wrong hormone receptor tests.
A Telegram series entitled “The Cameron Report: Ten Years After” by Barb Sweet this week revealed that Eastern Health can’t provide the number of patients who are still alive after botched tests to determine breast cancer treatment.
On Wednesday, New Democratic Party MHA Gerry Rogers pressed Haggie on the matter.
“It’s been 10 years since the Cameron inquiry into the breast cancer hormone testing tragedy and we are only now learning that no one has been monitoring the patients as a cohort nor keeping longitudinal statistics on this group of patients to assess the outcomes of these patients as a result of the errors,” Rogers said in the House of Assembly.
“Will he commit to also having a report released comparing the outcomes of these patients to other similar breast cancer patients in Canada during that time?”
Haggie says he will ask for an update.
“I will certainly take that request back to the cancer care centre and the Tumour Board and see what their recommendations might be, no problem,” he said.
In an exclusive interview last week, for the series, Eastern Health CEO David Diamond said the patients weren’t followed as a cohort after the errors were dealt with.
About 425 breast cancer patients received the wrong results from hormone receptor tests — used to determine treatment options — between 1997 and 2005 from what was then the Health Care Corp. of St. John's, which in 2005 was amalgamated into the then newly created Eastern Health.
The scandal over the errors and delays in disclosure of the problems, as well as results from new test results from Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, sparked the Cameron Inquiry in 2008. The damning report was released in 2009.
Eastern Health said in 2010 that 126 breast cancer patients had died since the errors were discovered, though it can never be known if the deaths were attributed to treatment decisions associated with the errors.
Eastern Health settled a $17.5-million class-action lawsuit related to the errors.
But Eastern Health can’t say now how many patients among those affected have since died —not without embarking on a research project.
They were never tracked as a group after the initial updates.
The patients received treatments where deemed necessary after their files were reviewed by a panel of specialists, including oncologists, pathologists and surgeons.
“So, once that was done and the patients went on a new treatment regime, then they were put back in our regular system,” Diamond said in the exclusive interview to give an update on the Cameron Report recommendations.
“So, we haven’t been following them as a cohort or treating them as a cohort. They are individual patients in our system. So, when you ask how many people would be deceased since then, that’s not a number — I mean I guess as a research project it is something we can do, but we would have to go back through our electronic systems and get the proper approvals through privacy to actually be checking up once you go back in the system.”
Diamond said the decision not to track the patients as a group was made before his time at the helm of Eastern Health. He is the second CEO since the scandal.
Twitter: BarbSweetTweets
Twitter: DavidMaherNL
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