Jehan Siddiqui: 'I've never ever thrown anything on any patient. Never.' (CBC)

A St. John's oncologist who was the subject of bitter testimony this winter at Newfoundland and Labrador's cancer inquiry has flatly denied that he threw a medical chart at a patient.

Breast cancer patient Beverley Green, on the opening day of testimony at the Cameron inquiry in March, said oncologist Jehan Siddiqui treated her with disrespect when he delivered the results of a liver biopsy.

"He took it and he said, 'is this what you want?' And he threw it at me — he threw it at me, and he walked out the door," Green told the inquiry.

Green also testified that Siddiqui told her there was no cure for her type of cancer, and while she said his behaviour was out of character, the incident left her furious.

But testifying Monday before Justice Margaret Cameron, Siddiqui said it never happened.

"I've never ever thrown anything on any patient. Never," Siddiqui said.

"I've been working in this institution for close to eight years now and my colleagues or my other staff or people working who have been working with me — if they can identify a single incident in which I was disrespectful to them or I did anything which was misbehaving in any way, they won't be able to find one."

Still sees patient regularly, MD tells inquiry

Siddiqui said his habit is to leave a chart in an examining room as he leaves it, in order to give his patients privacy while they change.

"This is my usual routine. I don't think I've done anything different than that. [But] I never threw anything on anybody. If there is something that she's taking in a different way from what I have been doing usually … again that never involves throwing anything in any way. That is it."

After Green testified, Siddiqui said, he offered her the option of seeing another oncologist. She said she decided to remain his patient.

"I have seen her nine times in between that time period, and not even once — not even once — has she brought up any such thing like that, that I was disrespectful to her in any way," Siddiqui said.

Not consulted on retesting process

Meanwhile, Siddiqui testified that he did not have a high opinion of how Eastern Health managed retests of hundreds of suspect hormone receptor tests, which are used to help guide the treatment that breast cancer patients receive.

Cameron is examining what went wrong with hundreds of those tests, and what officials did once they learned of the errors.

Siddiqui said no one at Eastern Health consulted him about an ambitious plan to do a massive retesting of those tests. He told Cameron that if he had been asked, he would have suggested that patients be told right away because the process would take so long.

"If it's going to take that long, and it has to be done in batches, then probably informing patients may be reasonable idea," said Siddiqui.

The retests began in the summer of 2005, although patients were not formally notified for more than a year — even though the first media reports on the flawed tests appeared in October 2005.

Even so, some patients did not receive results until earlier this year.

The inquiry has been told that Eastern Health officials decided not to tell patients about the flawed tests until all the retests were done, with some executives testifying that oncologists were concerned about scaring their patients.

'Everybody had a lot of questions'

Siddiqui said after news broke in 2005 that there were problems with estrogen receptor and progesterone receptor tests, he started hearing from anxious patients.

"Everybody had a lot of questions," Siddiqui testified.

"I had patients booked for 20 minutes that took an hour, [an] hour and a half. There were times that I saw patients two or three times just for discussion of that," said Siddiqui, adding that Eastern Health had not provided guidance on how to counsel patients.

"In terms of instruction, what to tell them, I don't think that we had any."

Moreover, Siddiqui testified, he had been left with the impression that the mistakes were caused by lab equipment and how it was being used. He said he passed that message on to his patients.

However, the inquiry has been told that two external reviewers who were brought in to the St. John's lab in 2005 ruled out the testing equipment, and determined a range of problems including poor training, high staff turnover and inadequate quality control.