Why the multi-disciplinary approach with Medicine, Business and Philosophy?

School of Medicine: Dr Margaret McCartney says the impulse to create something like this was building for a long time. “There have been so many things that have gone badly wrong in healthcare. Why did that happen? Was it predictable? Could you have learned from the past a bit more than perhaps you appear to have done?” The Centre, she says, is meant to be a place where evidence-based medicine and ethical questions can be discussed together, “because quite often there’s been patient harm as a result of those two things not being adequately considered”.

Business School: “Often we revert to our own silos, and we look at things in isolation from each other,” Professor Kevin Orr says. “But the complexity and the importance of questions around healthcare are best addressed through an interdisciplinary lens. That’s the gap the Centre is hopefully filling.”

School of Philosophy: Dr Joseph Millum, who spent 15 years as a bioethicist at the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH), sees evidence and values as inseparable rather than competing. “Where things go wrong is where people think that evidence or scientific data can operate independently of value judgements.” Decisions about whether to expand primary care, build hospitals or train more nurses, he argues, are always both empirical and ethical. “The evidence is going to tell us what we end up with. The values will help us assess which policy options we prefer. The mistake is to think that they are independent.”