Dr. Máirín Ryan:

If we were asked, for example, to assess a particular technology where there is no evidence of clinical effectiveness, we cannot do a health technology assessment on it because what we do is evidence-based work. If there is no evidence of a treatment being effective, we cannot provide advice on that. All we can do is state there is no evidence to demonstrate this technology is effective. That has happened occasionally. It is often a case of giving advice in the early stages of the development of a technology where the evidence showing the benefits of it has not been collected yet. If the evidence is there, however, then we have standard methods we can use to pull together all the information to give us the estimate of what benefit it can deliver.