Bern Coffey suggested that senior Eastern Health managers 'understood full well' what could be achieved by keeping critical reviews out of the public eye. (CBC)

A lawyer for Newfoundland and Labrador's breast cancer inquiry made a startling accusation Tuesday, by suggesting that health managers deliberately kept secret the reasons hundreds of breast cancer patients received wrong test results.

Bern Coffey was questioning Pat Pilgrim, a chief operating officer at Eastern Health, about reports by external experts that the authority tried — but failed — in Newfoundland Supreme Court to keep out of the public eye.

Eastern Health had argued in court that the reports were peer reviews and were meant to be confidential. Earlier this year, a Newfoundland Supreme Court justice ordered the reports — which documented a myriad of problems, from inadequate training and poor handling to high staff turnover, and which one St. John's physician described as "fairly damning" — be released to the public.

Coffey suggested that Eastern Health had other motives to sit on the reports, which were commissioned in 2005, when the authority learned there were serious problems with hormone receptor tests.

"I'm suggesting to you that the management, the senior management, in the fall of 2005 understood full well that as long as these peer reviews will remain secret, there's no other investigation going on … and we will therefore never have any result to tell anybody about why, because we don't know why except in the peer reviews," Coffey told Pilgrim.

"Therefore," he added, "you'd never have to tell patients."

But Pilgrim disagreed, and said that Eastern Health had always planned to do another investigation — one that wouldn't be kept confidential.

"There was always an understanding that we would, at some point, be able to sit down and talk about what happened in the lab," she told Justice Margaret Cameron, who has been hearing evidence since March on what went wrong in Eastern Health's pathology lab, and on how officials responded.

"You know, we were never just going to leave this to [just saying], 'Well, someone has come in and done two reports, they're confidential so nobody knows what happened,' " she said.

Pilgrim admitted, though, that she could not prove that that was Eastern Health's intention.

The reports — by British Columbia pathologist Diponkar Banerjee and Trish Wegrynowski, a senior technologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto — have been pivotal throughout the Cameron inquiry, and indeed even before it started.

The inquiry's launch was pushed back almost two months because of Eastern Health's unsuccessful court challenge. During the proceedings, evidence presented included a letter by St. John's breast cancer pathologist Beverley Carter, who described them as "fairly damning."

Carter, who would later testify about problems with quality control and management at the pathology lab, was among a select group who actually got to read the Banerjee and Wegrynowski reports.

The inquiry has frequently heard from key Eastern Health staff who were not given copies of the report to read, including one of the lab's managers. Lab staff were also not briefed on what the reviews found.