Nuffield Council on Bioethics / Home

PRESENT
Professor Sir John Krebs FRS (Chair)
Dr Raghib Ali
Professor Tom Baldwin
Professor Roger Brownsword
Professor Christine Godfrey
Professor Anne Johnson FmedSci
Ms Julia Unwin OBE CBE

APOLOGIES
Professor Sir Kenneth Calman KCB FRCS DL FRSE, Professor Trisha Greenhalgh OBE, Professor Jonathan Montgomery, Professor Sally Macintyre OBE FRSE CBE

SECRETARIAT
Mr Hugh Whittall, Mr Harald Schmidt, Ms Caroline Rogers, Ms Julia Trusler

INTRODUCTION BY THE CHAIR
1 The Chair welcomed the members of the Working Party and also Mr Hugh Whittall, who had recently been appointed as the new Director of the Council. The focus of the meeting would be reviewing the peer review comments and agreeing the required changes.

MINUTES OF THE SEVENTH MEETING OF THE WORKING PARTY
2 The minutes were approved.

PEER REVIEW COMMENTS
3 Members agreed that the reviewers comments had been of exceptionally high quality, and were very useful in helping the Working Party to define its view on a number of complex issues some of which had not yet been considered in appropriate detail.

4 Overall it was clear that a more collectivist stance would be adopted by the Working Party. This would be reflected in particular in the section on inequalities, personal responsibility and rationing, and the role of the environment. On the question of the specificity the Report will neither be limited to an abstract ethical framework, nor seek to provide a detailed list of highly specific conclusions and recommendations. Instead, each case study chapter would illustrate the implications of the preceding chapters on ethics and policy, and the introduction would clarify this approach.

5 More detailed revisions would be made in particular in relation to: the concept of ‘health’, ‘public health’, ‘public good’ and ‘public services’; the role of the state concerning opportunities for health; the discussion on corporate social responsibility; the role of the environment and the status of vulnerable people; the discussion on risk, risk perception and the precautionary approach; targeting vs universal strategies and stigmatization issues; social marketing; the role of campaigning organizations; the section on issues raised by pandemics; the status of anonymised data in research; the question of the implications of action and inaction in public health matters and the need to justify both acts and omissions; the role of genetics in obesity; scenarios of market failure; evidence on harm and benefits in the case of the fluoridation debate; the role of monitoring especially in relation to ‘action research’.

WORK PLAN
6 The Secretariat would make the agreed changes and circulate a revised version of the Report in due course. The lead authors would circulate revised conclusions and recommendations to the whole Working Party by email. These would be finalized at the May meeting.

ANY OTHER BUSINESS
7 There was none

Last Updated Thu, 8 November 2007