medical notes enabling them to record the number and sites
of vulval excisions. The aim was to compare the area of the
surgery and the size of the excision with any postoperative
sexual dysfunction. However a risk of such an approach is
that medical notes may be incomplete impacting on the
records’ representativeness. This appeared as an issue in one
study (Andersen et al. 1988) where a low incidence of
notations in the medical notes of postoperative summaries
regarding numbness, sexual problems and body image
disturbances was reported