A leading St. John's oncologist has testified that questionable breast cancer tests may have been reviewed sooner had she known that pathology testing was temporarily shut down in 2003.

Dr. Kara Laing provided influential advice in how Eastern Health proceeded with a large retesting program in 2005, and on the authority's controversial decision not to inform patients immediately.

Testifying Tuesday at the Cameron inquiry, Laing said that she did not know that testing results were found to be so questionable two years earlier that they were suspended for more than a month.

Laing said that she first became aware of problems with hormone receptor tests in the spring of 2005, and had not been told that serious problems had been flagged in 2003, in a memo in which pathologist Gershon Ejeckam warned of potential threats to patient safety.

"I do recall that when I first actually read that first statement — that said they were unreliable, erratic and therefore unhelpful — that really struck home with me, that this was not something that I had seen," Laing told Justice Margaret Cameron.

Laing also did not that the section of the St. John's pathology handling hormone receptor tests was shut down for five weeks.

No one told her, she said, and she did not notice any delay in getting test results back.

Would have had a different response

She told Cameron, who is examining why hundreds of breast cancer patients received inaccurate test results between 1997 and 2005, that had she been brought into the loop in 2003, she would have demanded immediate retesting.

"[I] would've had to say, 'Well, what are we going to do about this now? We've had some test results come out that we've acted upon [and have] treated patients in the clinic based upon those results,' " she testified.

Laing added she would have "wanted to go back and look at those again."

Laing is not the first physician to testify that she was not aware of Ejeckam's memo. In May, Dr. Robert Williams, who retired in 2006 as the vice-president of medical services, said that no one had briefed him on Ejeckam's memo.

Laing, who began her testimony on Monday afternoon, has not yet been asked why she advised officials on not going public with the testing problems until all of the retest results were known.

Eastern Health did not begin a patient notification program until more than a year after it became aware of problems with the hormone receptor tests, which are used to help determine whether a breast cancer patient can benefit from the powerful antihormonal drug Tamoxifen.

The inquiry was called in 2007, after court documents showed that Eastern Health had been aware that the error rate of a large number of retested samples was several times higher than officials had admitted.