Ms Sharon Casey:

Consent is only relevant where there is a choice to engage in another way. A person might have lifelong issues with literacy or their cognitive abilities might change. Consent needs to be an ongoing process. A person may consent to something in 2025 but may not want to consent to it in 2026 or 2030, so it is an ongoing conversation. This is no disrespect to the experts who are doing the programming and who have done research but we need to have the voice of the people who are most affected by this at the table when conversations are happening. This is a great opportunity here. At the moment there is a lot of talk about public patients coming together and about making medical advances better. In that sphere they are realising that we need the voice of the patient to be represented in the outcomes. We are not patients, but the voices of groups that could be marginalised by AI need to be involved at the conversation table.