Health Sciences North class action over missed breast cancer diagnosis discontinued

Update: 

• A class action lawsuit alleging that an Ontario hospital failed to detect breast cancer due to numerous imaging errors and mismanagement for over a decade has been discontinued.
• “The lawsuit was discontinued on the consent of all parties and with court approval,” lawyer for the plaintiffs Jordan Assaraf said in an email to CBC News and reported June 23.
• Assaraf said anyone wanting to advance an individual claim should seek legal advice. The deadline to do that is Aug. 31. 
• The lawsuit originally saw lead plaintiff Shannon Hayes alleging that the systematic negligence of radiology services offered at Sudbury’s Health Sciences North hospital resulted in missed breast cancer diagnoses between 2008 and 2020. 
• The class action lawsuit had sought at least $22 million in damages.

(Feb. 12, 2021)

An Ontario hospital has allegedly failed to detect breast cancer due to numerous imaging errors and mismanagement for over a decade, a class action lawsuit claims.

Lead plaintiff, Shannon Hayes, says that the systematic negligence of radiology services offered at Sudbury’s Health Sciences North hospital resulted in missed breast cancer diagnoses between 2008 and 2020. The class action lawsuit is claiming at least $22 million in damages, including punitive damages against the hospital.

Hayes claims that her breast cancer was missed by Sudbury’s Health Sciences North hospital. She says that she went to the hospital in 2018 to scan a lump. Hayes says she was told the lump was benign, but that unfortunately was not the case. As a result of the misdiagnosis in 2018, her treatment was delayed by over a year and now she is facing a much more severe diagnosis – metastatic cancer.

Allegedly, the hospital conducts over 5,000 mammograms alone each year, making it a major source of revenue; however, the Radiology Department at HSN was plagued with substandard service and substandard processes to identify and correct problems.

The lawsuit accuses the hospital of “an overwhelming, objective decline in the standards of practice in the performance and interpretation of Breast Imaging” that resulted in the misdiagnosis of patients, as well as delays in treatments that caused harm between 2008 and 2020.

The breast screening and assessment service (BSAS) allegedly encountered imaging quality issues that “significantly impacted the BSAS Team’s ability to manage patients to an appropriate standard of care, which in turn compromised patient care and put patients unnecessarily at risk through a failure to correctly diagnose patients and treat patients with breast pathology and other conditions in a timely fashion,” states the proposed class action.

The lawsuit claims that a toxic work environment in the hospital’s Radiology Department dissuaded health care workers from raising legitimate concerns. The class action also names hospital administrators and department heads as defendants in the lawsuit.

“There needs to be a fundamental change in the culture of safety and quality at HSN,” plaintiff Hayes told CBC News.

“I was outraged to learn that HSN administration knew about problems for months before my imaging was misread but did nothing and kept the problems at the hospital under wraps.”

Were you or a loved one affected by a missed breast cancer diagnosis due to errors at Sudbury’s Health Sciences North hospital? We want to hear from you. Tell us about your experience in the comment section below.

The lead plaintiffs and proposed Class Members are represented by Gluckstein Lawyers.

The Missed Breast Cancer Class Action Lawsuit is Shannon Hayes v. Health Science North, et al., Case No. CV-20-00009554-00CP in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

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