The symposium was based on facilitated group discussions and subject presentations around the core principles of open discussion and consensus building. The participants were first split into three multidisciplinary teams. The aim was that each group would have representatives from all the disciplines represented at the symposium. Each group had one session discussing the research areas and emergent research themes, and three sessions focused on refining the emergent research questions. The discussions in these sessions were facilitated by a group chairperson. At the end of each session the outcomes from each group were combined and discussed in plenary session. The subject presentation focused on introducing and summarizing the different components of the symposium.
By the close of the symposium, three specific outcomes were achieved. Firstly, the themes that surfaced during the email-mediated discussions were revisited, discussed and amended. Secondly, the long list of 215 questions was distilled to a short list of 50 questions. This reduction came through a process that involved combining similar questions, developing composite questions from those that addressed similar themes and testing each question for relevance and suitability for research. Thirdly, a self-selected steering group of 17 people, covering the range of disciplines represented in the symposium, agreed to take forward detailed discussion of the points raised during the symposium, to distil further the short list of questions and to draw the list and themes together into a research paper. This further iteration of questions formed the third and final stage of the Delphi process.