The only way is ethics: meet the new chair of The BMJ’s ethics committee
Siobhán O’Sullivan cites AI and trust as the ethical challenges of today—and decries the back seat that medical ethics is often pushed into I was working at the Royal Free Hospital in London in the late 1990s, and there was some discussion around the retention of children’s organs without consent—sparked by what had been happening in children’s heart surgery at Bristol Royal Infirmary and then uncovered at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool in the 1980s and ’90s. Every department had to audit what materials they might have, and I was involved in doing that for our department. Those events really sparked my interest in ethics and building trust with patients in medicine and medical research. Trust is a fundamental building block of the relationship between researchers and patients: if we don’t have trust with our patients we can’t do research. After my training in ethics an opportunity came up to establish the first Council for Bioethics in Ireland, and I jumped at the chance. I
