Ms Lucy Nugent:

We are apologising for any distress the letters may cause. The reason we wrote to those families, as I explained earlier, was that there was an early recommendation that any child who had any type of hip surgery for dysplasia - all children - should be consistently followed up to skeletal maturity. Rather than waiting for the final report to be issued, we wanted to advise families that they would be contacted by us, and some of them have been already, to start that process of skeletal follow-up to maturity. We understand that in trying to communicate openly, there was a balance between being open and transparent and the possibility of causing concern because we did not yet have all the answers. We felt it was better to err on the side of saying we will be calling people for skeletal maturity follow-up. That is an international best practice recommendation - I think the Deputy is wondering about this - irrespective of whether the surgery was necessary.