Dr. Kara Laing, Eastern Health's clinical chief of oncology, made the statement during a November 2006 meeting with Health Department officials, in advance of a media briefing to divulge the number of patients whose tests were wrong, former provincial health minister Tom Osborne testified.
"Kara Laing, I recall, saying that she wasn't concerned with the dead, her concern was with the living," Osborne said.
A senior adviser in Osborne's office then told her "You had better come up with a better response, or something to that effect, when you present this in the media briefing, because that's clearly not acceptable," Osborne said.
"The whole conversation around the deceased had deteriorated. Voices were raised. There was a bit of shouting back and forth. The meeting was quite heated at that particular point."
Earlier, Osborne said he may have been able to encourage Eastern Health to divulge information about breast-cancer testing errors sooner if he were kept in the loop.
Tom Osborne has testified that he didn't see August 2006 briefing notes that detailed the scope of the errors until May 2007 - when he was the province's justice minister.
Those notes were sent to Premier Danny Williams, as well as several of his top officials.
Osborne said he believes he may have been able to encourage faster public disclosure about the testing problems if he knew the extent of them at the time.
The premier's office says it was unaware that Osborne wasn't being told about the testing mistakes by staff in the Health Department and Eastern Health.
The inquiry is looking into why nearly 400 breast-cancer patients were given the wrong results on their tests, and whether Eastern Health or any other responsible authorities responded to them and the public appropriately.
The inquiry is focusing on hormone-receptor tests, which are used by doctors to determine the course of treatment for breast-cancer patients.
If patients are found to be estrogen-and/or progesterone-positive, they may respond to hormone therapy such as Tamoxifen. If not, they may be given a range of other treatments, or no treatment at all, depending on the characteristics of the patient's cancer.
Problems with the testing weren't detected until the spring of 2005, when doctors began questioning the hormone-receptor test results of a patient with invasive lobular carcinoma, a form of breast cancer.
After retesting, it was discovered that the initial test result was wrong, as were those for a small sample of other patients.
Eastern Health subsequently halted testing in its lab and transferred its hormone-receptor tests to Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.
The health board then started a review of all hormone-receptor tests from 1997 to 2005.
