The Supreme Court allowed the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland’s appeal and dismissed RAS Medical Limited’s application for judicial review, restoring the refusal of CPD accreditation for a plastic surgery master class involving three live surgeries.
RAS, trading as Park West Clinic, had applied for accreditation for the one-day event. The College refused the application on 9 July 2013, saying the event’s chief organiser needed to be on the specialist register in plastic surgery. RAS challenged that refusal, arguing that the requirement was not in the guidelines in force when it applied.
The High Court rejected the judicial review. The Court of Appeal later quashed the refusal, finding that the College had applied new guidelines to RAS’s application. The College appealed to the Supreme Court, which considered both the use of discovered internal documents and the treatment of sworn affidavit evidence.
Chief Justice Clarke held that RAS had not properly established the discovered documents as evidence simply by exhibiting them in an affidavit. But because the College had not objected to their use before the High Court, it was too late to challenge the Court of Appeal’s reliance on them.
The Court also held that the Court of Appeal should not have rejected Professor Sean Tierney’s sworn evidence about which guidelines were applied without giving him an opportunity to answer the challenge, such as through cross-examination. The Court of Appeal was therefore wrong to reach a contrary factual conclusion from its interpretation of the internal documents.
However, that did not determine the appeal by itself. The Supreme Court concluded that the original guidelines allowed the College to assess the standing and status of those involved in a proposed CPD event and to refuse accreditation if it was not satisfied with the personnel. The guidelines required information about sponsors and speakers, although they did not specify a particular professional status. The Court found that the College was entitled to seek information about a specialist-register consultant and that no challenge to the reasonableness of that request had been made at the time.
The Supreme Court allowed the College’s appeal and dismissed RAS’s judicial review application. It did not quash the refusal; it held that refusal was open to the College under the original guidelines.