We thank Dr Preece for his comments. We believe that he is justified in questioning the make-up of the panel and that this has a significant bias for tertiary assessment of occupational lung disease. However, our aim in performing this process was to get this group of experts to agree on “definitions” with a view to unifying the label at this later clinical stage of the process.1 In addition, we hoped that the requirements of a specialist occupational lung disease assessment service would form a basis for developing a “standards of care” document for …