DOCTORS throughout the State will this morning be wondering about the potential consequences for them of yesterday's decision to hold fitness to practise hearings in public.
People involved with the child protection system in the late 1980s will also be trying to assess the effects of having four of the five cases currently before the committee reported in the media.
For the public the move offers the possibility of greater accountability in a system which traditionally does its work behind closed doors.
A significant aspect of yesterday's decision was that it was taken following an application for a public hearing by Mr Edward Hernon, one of the parents whose complaints against Dr Woods are the subject of the inquiry.
The committee has been giving doctors the option of having their cases heard in public but none has so far taken them up on it. This option began to be put to doctors this year after a French doctor won a decision in the European Court of Human Rights that he was entitled to a public hearing before a similar tribunal in his own country.
If more complainants follow the lead of Mr Hernon and seek public hearings, it is difficult to see how they can be denied, in most cases at any rate.
For doctors that raises the spectre of having their cases widely reported, a process which is likely to be stressful and may be damaging whatever the outcome.
Dr Woods can appeal yesterday's decision to the High Court. However, the court has already ruled in another case that the Fitness to Practise Committee has the discretion to hold inquiries in public so long as the decision is neither arbitrary nor capricious.
If the decision is not appealed, the hearings are expected to get under way in January.
They will deal with complaints relating to Dr Woods's diagnoses in the late 1980s when the Rotunda Sexual Assault Unit, of which she was the director, provided medical assessments of most cases of alleged child sexual abuse.
Dr Woods has a reputation as a social campaigner and as a pioneer in dealing with sexual assaults on adults and children.
She did a great deal to bring about a more accepting attitude towards rape victims and children who had been sexually abused. Her work had an important influence on the development of services and on legislation in these areas.
But in at least two of the cases before the Fitness to Practise Committee children were returned to their parents by the courts.
In one case, in 1991, Judge Peter Smithwick, President of the District Court, was severely critical of Dr Woods.
She had, he said, made "a too precipitate diagnosis of abuse" and had treated the mother in the case "most unfairly and insensitively."
An interview with the children using anatomical dolls, conducted by Dr Woods, was a remarkably short one and should have taken place or have been repeated in the presence of the mother, he said. A diagnosis of one form of sexual abuse arising from this interview seemed to him to be far fetched, he said.
He was critical of Dr Woods for erasing a videotape of her interview with the child. The tape, he said, "might either be a convincing corroboration of her evidence, or, alternatively, the opposite."
Dr Woods had told the court she had erased the tape because the sound had not come out in the recording of a later, unconnected interview with other parties on the same tape.
In next year's hearings, the parents are likely to seek to call witnesses from throughout the child protection system.
Whether this is allowed by the Fitness to Practise Committee remains to be seen.
One way or another, the inquiry will engender great public interest, particularly in the light of the debate on mandatory reporting of child abuse and suspicions of child abuse.