Leighton Seal

And therefore, when you're doing operations that we have to accept at some point somebody will regret the surgery they've done.

So to allow people to move the field forward, you need to have a support network around you as a clinician so that if that decision is made and that decision is regretted, how did you make that decision process?

So as an individual practitioner, if you make that in isolation, you could be vulnerable to being criticized for doing something that is outside of the norm.

Whereas if you have a network around you where a clinical team in concert with the individual has made a decision, you then have a framework to say, well, the ethics of this were explored.

Because you have a situation where you can explore the ethics of that.

Because we are doing procedures here where we don't have outcome data.

So for a vaginoplasty, for a phalloplasty, there is long-term outcome data of what the pros, the cons, the psychological impact, the sexual functioning impact is for these newer procedures.

We don't have that outcome.

So unless you want to go to individual ethics boards in each hospital to get ethics permission to do those surgeries because they're on the edge of the field of medicine, you need to have a mechanism around you to support you.

Otherwise, you could be vulnerable.