More than 2,000 people voted in the competition, with comedians Bec Hill, Ria Lina and Felicity Ward also among the top 10 finalists selected by a specialist panel who sifted through more than 3,600 minutes of material to pick their favourites.
Other awards on the night will again be Young Sports Personality of the Year and Unsung Hero, which will continue to be decided by the existing specialist panel system - plus the Lifetime Achievement and Helen Rollason awards which will be decided by the board of BBC Sport.
Table 1 shows the three-level hierarchy agreed upon by the specialist panel.
The study protocol was reviewed by the WHO specialist panel as well as approved by the WHO Research Ethics Review Committee.
We have preliminary data (not shown) to suggest that general practitioner panels will score around the same mean as a specialist panel but with a wider SD.
Whilst access to non-standard second-line regimens was possible through application to a provincial specialist panel, this process also often gave rise to substantial delays.
Our specialist panel debated and reached agreement on allocation of 'symptomatic terms,' however such allocation necessarily involves greater potential for error than the classification of established diagnoses.
The efforts of the Nevada State Health Department to address earlier recommendations have recently been reviewed in a long-awaited final report by a specialist panel (Expert Panel on Childhood Leukemia in Churchill County, Nevada, 2004; Sinks and Smith, 2004).
