Annex A > Chapter 1 - The Background to and Conduct of the Public Inquiry > Commissioned work
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Commissioned work
80 The Inquiry commissioned work from external sources and from members of the Inquiry's Expert Group.
81 One particular, extensive piece of work was that of obtaining all the available clinical records relating to children receiving cardiac surgical services in Bristol between 1984 and 1995. This involved 1, 827 cases falling within the Terms of Reference. [27] An expert coder, using a standardised set of codes, coded each of the clinical records, [28] so that an independent database could be established for the Inquiry. The results were then subject to analysis, and contributed to a statistical evaluation of the adequacy of the service at Bristol.
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Footnotes
[27] The Inquiry received 2, 056 children's records, comprising 3, 497 individual files (as children treated at the BRI and BRHSC had a separate set of notes from each hospital): a total of 673, 963 pages of medical records
[28] The codes used were those routinely used by hospital administrative systems at the time: ICD9 for diagnosis and OPCS4 for procedure