HALIFAX - A patients advocacy group on the French islands of St-Pierre-Miquelon says a Newfoundland health agency did a poor job informing eight women on the islands about breast cancer testing mistakes.
The French government pays the St. John's-based Eastern Health Authority to provide health care to residents on the windswept archipelago about 20 kilometres off the south coast of Newfoundland.
Jaqueline Park, a member of a patient rights association in St-Pierre, said Eastern Health should have telephoned the women or written a letter in French to inform them about errors detected in hormone-receptor tests in 2005.
Instead, the health authority sent a letter to the women's oncologist on St-Pierre-Miquelon in 2005, at around the same time other affected women - most of them in Newfoundland - were informed directly by phone or through their doctors.
Park said that the health authority's performance "has been insufficient, it's poor."
"I still think they should have contacted each woman personally as a precaution, as a measure of security to be sure that the ladies received the information," she said in an interview in St-Pierre, the capital and largest community on the islands.
Of the eight women in St-Pierre-Miquelon whose tests were redone, three of them were told the new results indicated the should have received different treatment.
Meanwhile, Eastern Health - now at the centre of a public inquiry investigating why 383 breast cancer patients received inaccurate hormone receptor test results -- says the women on the French islands weren't treated differently than other patients.
Pat Pilgrim, the authority's chief operating officer of oncology, said the health authority asked the French oncologist "to communicate the information to each individual patient" in the fall of 2005.
"We didn't do anything differently for St-Pierre-Miquelon than we did for other patients," she said.
"I can see why patients would appreciate a direct call, but that wasn't what we did in a lot of a cases in Canada. We went through the physician."
Still, the advocacy group in St-Pierre also says there was a delay in receiving a French version of the original documents.
Pilgrim said the oncologist in St-Pierre was given a briefing in English on the need for the eight women to be retested.
She said a bilingual employee at Eastern Health followed up with a telephone call to ensure the oncologist had understood that the eight women needed to be retested.
"She (the employee) was certainly able to communicate all of these points in French to the doctor," said Pilgrim.
The group Park formed is demanding to have its say at the inquiry headed by Justice Margaret Cameron, and has written a letter to her asking for standing at the inquiry.
A decision is expected by early next week.
The eight St-Pierre-Miquelon women who received inaccurate tests for their breast cancer received their tests between 1999 and 2005.
Three of the women have died as a result of their illness, but it remains unclear whether the inaccurate tests played a role in their deaths.
