1. The qualifications and practices of the psychiatrist;

2. The opportunity the psychiatrist had to assess the person, including: length of personal contact, place of contact, role with ongoing treatment, and involvement with the institution in which the person is a patient or prisoner;

3. The unique features of the doctor-patient relationship, such as hostility or fear by the patient (or the psychiatrist) arising from the personalities, the circumstances of the contact, and the role of the psychiatrist;

4. Specifically and precisely what documents the psychiatrist had available and reviewed, for example, from earlier court proceedings, institutional records, other medical consultations, or treatment;

5. Nature and scope of consultations (this could include: personal contact with third parties, information from other health care professionals, prison authorities, police, lawyers, family);

6. Specifically and precisely what the psychiatrist relies on in coming to an opinion; and

7. The strengths and weaknesses of the information and material that is relied upon.

At page 50, the Court went on to articulate the kinds of situations that should be recognized as weaknesses if relied upon for the purposes of predicting risk as follows: "incomplete records; lack of reliability such as might occur where a document is created for one purpose but used for another (e.g., a prison incident report being used to predict future behaviour); lack of trustworthiness such as where the subject of an interview is lying or describing fantasies as if they were realities (including in diaries); lack of objectivity or first hand knowledge by the author of a report.… Another area of potential weakness arises from information provided by the offender.… It is necessary therefore that the Court be satisfied that a psychiatrist testifying ... understand the significance of the expert opinion in the determination to which it is directed."

The Court also discussed the importance of knowing the purpose and basis of such assessments, as well as the nature of the assessor's appreciation of the individual being assessed. "Another consideration which potentially affects the weight of experts' evidence has to do with the experts' contact with the offender. Here, there were dramatic differences in the profile of the doctor-patient relationship between Lisa Neve and each of the various psychiatrists. Some interviewed her only briefly and on few occasions. Others had a more sustained relationship with her, while one had treated her over a number of years" (50). The Court then went on to discuss the fact that "the essence of psychiatric diagnosis is the subjective assessment of the patient by a psychiatrist with testing sometimes being an available tool which may provide assistance. The reality is that a psychiatric assessment depends on information provided by the patient" (55).