Calgary clinic clerk says doctor directed her to queue-jump his patients

CALGARY – A clerk at a public cancer screening clinic in Calgary says she let patients jump the queue for tests at the direction of one of the doctors.

Olga Koch says she moved patients seeing Dr. Ron Bridges to the head of the line, even though he wasn’t a manager or had any authority at the Colon Cancer Screening Centre.

Koch told Alberta’s queue-jumping inquiry she did it out of respect for Bridges, who was the founder of the screening centre.

Koch says she didn’t move anybody else’s patients to the front of the line.

Clerks and doctors have alleged that Bridges, an associate dean in the University of Calgary’s faculty of medicine, was part of a queue-jumping scheme involving the privately run Helios Wellness Centre.

The inquiry has heard allegations that Helios donated hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to the university in return for their patients getting cancer tests within weeks while everyone else waited years.

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