Ms Marie Culliton:

We all know that when many people talk about clinicians they are talking about doctors. There is quite a difference between an orthopaedic surgeon and an ophthalmologist. I would not expect one or the other to comment on the outsourcing of their services. There may well have been clinicians involved but the majority of the clinicians working on the cervical programme are not laboratory medicine-based clinicians. A decision, therefore, was made about the outsourcing of laboratory tests probably without significant input from clinicians. When I say "clinicians", I mean both the pathologists and the scientists who are also clinicians in a regulated profession.