Dr. Colm Henry:

Having reviewed the report and having spoken to the author, Mr. Simon Thomas, it was clear that the most important thing for parents was the clinical follow-up to ensure there was skeletal maturity and to assess the impact of the lower threshold of surgery. It is also really important to them to find out whether surgery was appropriate in the first place, now that the finding was that there was a much lower threshold for surgery in two institutions. This is what I advised the CEO at the time. It went beyond Mr. Thomas's recommendations. We are applying that back to 2010.

This is a difficult and complex exercise in two ways. We have some experience of conducting independent exercises involving international experts. The action of exporting data, information and radiology findings of itself needs to be very tightly managed and controlled to ensure the international experts have all the information they need.

The synthesising of all that evidence into reports that then can be conveyed to families in a compassionate and supportive way is itself an exercise we have some experience of over the past few years. At the moment, we have identified a number of international experts. I will not name them at this stage, if that is okay. We are also getting the legal opinions necessary to set this up to make sure we have robust terms of reference.