Patient count continues, even after end of Cameron inquiry testimony
Public hearings at Newfoundland and Labrador's breast cancer inquiry may be over, but the search for affected patients is not.
Testimony at the Cameron inquiry concluded Friday in St. John's, albeit on a note that underscored a critical issue that ran throughout seven months of testimony: the exact number of patients were involved in botched laboratory tests.
The final witness, Wabush resident Elizabeth Finlayson, revealed that she did not learn until this August that she had been given inaccurate test results in 2000, shortly before surgery to remove a breast.
Finlayson's is not an isolated case. Since the inquiry launched in March, nine patients have also been identified as having been missed in original searches for patients who received inaccurate hormone receptor tests between 1997 and 2005, when a retesting program was launched.
Moreover, the Newfoundland and Labrador Centre for Health Information is still undergoing a thorough, case-by-case search of pathology reports.
Don MacDonald, director of research and evaluation at NLCHI, said a final number of patients may never be attainable, but researchers are determined to do their best.
"We're actually going through every pathology report over that period of time, from 1997-2005, and just looking for the term 'breast,' " said MacDonald, adding that previous searches for the term ER/PR — for the estrogen receptor and progesterone receptor tests at the heart of the inquiry — failed to locate some files.
"We'll actually have a team of researchers looking through those, looking for the ER/PR test, so [they will be] actually doing a much more comprehensive search."'
108 patients have died
The last update, released by the government this summer, showed that 386 patients received the wrong results for their hormone receptor tests. In March, the government revealed 108 of those patients had died, although no one knows whether a change in treatment would have extended or saved lives.
The NLCHI review will involve almost 10,000 pathology records alone at Eastern Health, the province's largest health authority. MacDonald said it can take about five minutes to review each record, meaning that the overall review will take time.
"It's a lot more work to it, but it's the only way we feel that we can [have] the highest degree of confidence possible to identify any missed patients," he said.
MacDonald said NLCHI hopes to have that search finished in three months.
Last year, the Newfoundland and Labrador government decided to build its own breast cancer patient database, at about the same time government ordered a judicial inquiry into what went wrong with the tests of almost 400 patients. Government officials said they could not trust the data that had been provided by Eastern Health.
Justice Margaret Cameron has committed to complete her report on the testing errors, as well as on the response of officials to the crisis, by the end of February.