Lab technologists at Eastern Health were never given formal training for breast cancer treatment tests, a former employee said Tuesday at the Cameron inquiry.

Peggy Welsh, a lab technologist in New Glasgow, N.S., worked at Eastern Health, Newfoundland and Labrador's largest health authority, for 15 years. The inquiry in St. John's, headed by Justice Margaret Cameron, is investigating how hundreds of breast cancer patients received inaccurate hormone receptor tests, which determine the treatment a patient should receive.

Welsh worked in the Eastern Health lab in the 1980s when a process called, immunohistochemical staining, or IHC, was introduced. That process was later used in the hundreds of faulty breast cancer tests.

Welsh said technologists never received any formal training on how to perform the process.

"We had a procedure that we followed just to make up the antibodies, put them on the slides, incubate the slides," Welsh said. "We didn't have very much, other than just hands-on training from the person who was doing it."

Welsh said there were no textbooks for formal technical training offered on the IHC procedure.

"I don't recall if it was a written procedure or not," Welsh said. "I probably made notes when he was teaching me, but I don't recall if there was ever a written procedure. I think there probably would have been, but I just don't remember that."

Welsh said she voluntarily attended some provincial health-care workshops on IHC, but the workshops amounted to a short lecture in a day conference setting, and she didn't get any technical training:

"There would have been maybe one or two lectures from a pathologist on immunochemistry, but no specific training program for IHC," Welsh said of the workshops.

Welsh said that during her time at Eastern Health, she took a one-day training seminar for a specific piece of lab equipment at a conference in Montreal. But Eastern Health never bought that piece of equipment.

The Cameron inquiry has been hearing testimony from patients, government officials and Eastern Health staff since March.