Mr. Patrick Lynch:

The real priority for the serious incident management team, SIMT, when it was established at about half five on Friday evening was, having discovered there were a large number of women who had not been communicated with, to ensure that contact was made with them over the weekend. That involved finding out who had been told and who had not been told. We did not know, when were started on Friday evening, whether the majority had been told or not. We discovered that in the cohort of 208 women only 48 had been communicated with. The other 162 women had not. Regardless of the other issues that had to be dealt with, the priority for myself and senior colleagues who stayed in all over the weekend was to inform these women. Clinicians went into hospitals to pull files and identify the women. Our objective was that from Monday everybody on that list had to be contacted and offered an appointment so that they could be told that a review had taken place which they should have been told about, and to make sure they had information on the outcome of that review as it pertained to each individual. The first focus was on the women concerned, and as the process has progressed other issues have been identified which the SIMT will focus on. We did not want to be deflected from the core purpose in the first few days. We could have got caught up in the data issues and not done what we were set up to do in the first place.