Prof Sarah Cunningham-Burley

Chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, and Professor of Medical and Family Sociology at the University of Edinburgh where she is co-head of the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society, Usher Institute.

Sarah’s keynote title: ‘Put ethics first to create equitable and inclusive health futures’

Research does not operate in a social and ethical vacuum – we regularly look to advancing science capabilities to drive innovative solutions to transform our health and how we deliver care.  And it is the relationship between science and society that shapes the whole ecosystem and we need to understand and reflect on this relationship.

Effective horizon scanning can help us anticipate future scientific developments and the opportunities and risks these may bring. It can also alert us to a range of ethical concerns, and to how and whether these are being taken into account at all stages of the innovation trajectory.

This presentation will use examples from the Nuffield Council of Bioethics work to highlight how embedding ethics into horizon scanning, futures and foresight can support equitable and inclusive health and health care and the role of innovation within it.

It will explore how we should go beyond simply anticipating the ethical implications of emergent scientific trends and seek to utilise ethics to shape such trends in the first place – placing issues such as equity and inclusion at the centre of decisions about where and what to innovate and exploring participatory approaches to doing so.