Newfoundland and Labrador's health minister said he has been angered by Eastern Health's prolonged inability to provide clear data on how it contacted patients involved in faulty breast cancer testing.

Ross Wiseman said the confusion over whether Eastern Health, which managed a St. John's pathology lab that produced hundreds of flawed hormone receptor tests, had contacted all affected patients has taken its toll.

Health Minister Ross Wiseman said he has been disturbed by ongoing confusion over how Eastern Health dealt with cancer patients.
(CBC)

"If you're inquiring about the range of my emotions on this issue since I've been seized with it last year, they've gone from anger to disbelief to shock and a variety of others," Wiseman said.

"Each and every time that I have questioned why or how come, you know, it is a source of great frustration."

During the course of his testimony, Wiseman was questioned over what he knew about the flawed breast cancer tests once he became minister in January 2007.

Wiseman had already acknowledged regret for having contributed to the anxiety that breast cancer patients must have felt because of his insistence in the spring and summer of 2007 that all patients had been contacted.

That turned out not to be the case. For a variety of reasons — including the merging of different record-keeping systems used at institutions that were brought together under the Eastern Health umbrella in 2005 — dozens of patients were not given the results of their tests.

As recently as Monday, officials said there were still two dozen patients who had not received their results, and that one had not even been told about the retesting itself.

Confidence shaken: premier

On Monday, Premier Danny Williams said he did not think that Eastern Health could win a class action lawsuit that was certified in 2007.

Williams also defended Wiseman from Opposition calls for his resignation — Wiseman has admitted to not reading his briefing notes on the cancer issue for about four months — and said he has also been upset by what has been disclosed to date.

"I shake my head," Williams said Monday. "How much confidence can I have in some Eastern Health officials who provided this information?"

George Tilley, who resigned as Eastern Health's chief executive officer in July 2007, took the stand at the inquiry Tuesday afternoon. Early questioning focused on his career before becoming the boss of the amalgamated health authority in 2005.

Justice Margaret Cameron is heading an inquiry examining what went wrong at a St. John's pathology lab between 1997 and 2005, and how officials responded to the revelations.

Hormone receptor tests are used to determine the course of treatment that a breast cancer patient can receive. In March, Wiseman disclosed that 383 breast cancer patients had been excluded from receiving antihormonal therapy like Tamoxifen. Of those, 108 had died.