Windsor Regional Hospital has been threatened with legal action from the drug supplier at the heart of the diluted chemotherapy drug scandal.
A faxed letter addressed to Windsor Regional CEO David Musyj on Friday from lawyers acting for Marchese Hospital Solutions inform Musyj and the hospital that the company will file a lawsuit for defamation unless Windsor Regional retracts the “repeated defamatory articles, press releases and broadcasts” it claims the hospital has made about Marchese over the past month.
“If (Marchese) thinks somehow I’m going to stop talking to (patients) publicly and privately, they’re fooling themselves,” Musyj told The Star on Saturday. “They can sue away.”
In Marchese’s letter to Musyj, Toronto lawyer Randy Pepper said the hospital’s public statements about Marchese “have significantly injured my clients’ reputations and standing in the community” and that the hospital can expect to be served with notice of legal action next week unless Windsor Regional drafts an “agreeable” press release to “set the record straight.”
News broke a month ago that diluted doses of two chemotherapy drugs, cyclophosphamide and gemcitabine, mixed and supplied by Marchese, had been administered to more than 1,200 cancer patients at four Ontario hospitals and one in New Brunswick. About 290 patients at Windsor Regional had received the diluted doses over the past year.
The bags of pre-mixed intravenous solution contained too much saline solution, thereby diluting the doses of medication by as much as 20 per cent.
The scandal set off a parliamentary inquiry, a class action lawsuit and separate investigations by the province, Health Canada and the Ontario College of Pharmacists.
Musyj said that at no point did he lay the blame for the drug error solely on Marchese. “I have never, ever said anything that was not truthful in any of this.”
“I have always said each one of us in this process is culpable,” he said. While the other parties involved, including the hospital and college of pharmacists, have since offered up solutions to prevent repeating the same error again, it’s “troubling” that Marchese has not publicly offered up any changes or suggestions of what it can do differently from now on, Musyj said.
In the lawyer’s letter to the hospital, Marchese indicates it will not sue if the hospital publishes a media release that will form the basis of its future public responses and if the hospital takes down any publications from its website which are “inconsistent” with that press release.
Musyj said “that’s not happening.”
Marchese spokesman Greg Wilkinson told The Star the company does not have any additional comments and referred back to the lawyer’s letter to explain the company’s position. Wilkinson added the company hopes Musyj’s past statements about being fair and not pointing fingers would set the tone going forward.
Musyj has criticized Marchese over the past months for not being forthcoming with information when the news of the diluted doses first broke and later said that common sense would dictate the drugs were not prepared according to contract or accepted standards – a claim Marchese has denied before the parliamentary committee now investigating the scandal.
The parliamentary inquiry which began at the end of April has since heard testimony from Windsor Regional administration as well as from the other affected hospitals, Cancer Care Ontario and Medbuy, the hospital-owned group purchasing organization responsible for awarding the contract to Marchese.
Among the issues disputed at the hearings was whether the problem lay in how the drugs were produced or in how they were administered.
Marchese CEO Marita Zaffiro maintained the company prepared the solution as per its contract and assumed each bag would be used for a single patient. But Windsor Regional’s chief pharmacist, as well as others testifying before the parliamentary inquiry, said the assumption is incorrect and that Marchese’s pharmacists should have know that the chemo treatment in each bag – four grams – is too much for a single patient, and so each bag would naturally be divided between patients.
Marchese did not have a licence to operate as either a Health Canada-regulated drug establishment or a pharmacy overseen by the Ontario College of Pharmacists. Zaffiro told the parliamentary committee she reached out to both organizations when she was incorporating the company and both declined to provide oversight.
