After cancer test furor, Eastern Health CEO steps down

The embattled chief executive officer of Newfoundland and Labrador's largest health authority has quit.

George Tilley's resignation as president and CEO of Eastern Health was accepted by the authority's board Monday, the board said in a statement.

Tilley has been under fire for weeks over how Eastern Health handled inaccurate laboratory tests involving hundreds of breast cancer patients.

Tilley apologized in May over how officials have released information on the tests, including an error rate that was several times higher than what the authority disclosed last year.

Tilley, however, had refused to tender his resignation, despite pressure from opposition politicians.

"When you have a challenge in your organization, it is really important that your leadership step up to the plate and manage your way through this," Tilley said May 31.

"So I'm certainly believing that I can contribute to that, and that's my plan."

No reason was provided forTilley's resignation in Monday's statement.

Tilley was the first chief executive officer of Eastern Health, taking charge of the authority after government amalgamated several hospital, nursing home and community health boards.

Before his January 2005 appointment to Eastern Health, he had run the St. John's Health Care Corp. Prior to that, he had served as chief executive officer of the Workplace, Health, Safety and Compensation Commission.

Disclosures over the flawed hormone receptor tests which are used to determine what sort of treatment that a patient will receive rocked political circles this spring, prompting Premier Danny Williams to call a judicial inquiry into the matter.

That inquiry, to be run by Margaret Cameron, a member of the Newfoundland Supreme Court's appeals division, was formally launched this week.

Details about the error rate of the tests were disclosed in documents filed with a class action suit that was recently certified by the Newfoundland Supreme Court.

Eastern Health disclosed in 2005 that it had had serious problems with hormone receptor tests, which determine whether patients are suitable to receive the hormonal drug Tamoxifen, which has been clinically shown to help breast cancer patients fight their disease.

Court documents showed that the error rate of a large number of retested samples was about 42 per cent, far higher than the rate of 10 per cent or 15 per cent that officials had disclosed during a briefing last December.

An affidavit filed with the court showed that of 763 patients who had tested negative, 317 had been given inaccurate results. About a third were later given Tamoxifen.

A separate document, a letter by consulting forensic pathologist Charles Hutton, showed that 36 women who had been given false test results had died.

Meanwhile, Eastern Health had been dealing with problems on a separate front. It suspended the privileges of a Burin Peninsula radiologist, and had been reviewing of thousands of records such as X-rays, CT scans and ultrasounds that Fred Kasirye generated between last fall and this spring.

In a statement, Eastern Health board chair Joan Dawe said Louise Jones who had served as a chief operating officer responsible for adult acute care will take over as interim president and CEO.