From principle to practice: Reimagining ethics for public health futures

The COVID-19 pandemic intensified interest in public health ethics, yet a critical gap remains: public health is rarely examined as an integrated ethical practice, and professionals often lack structured support for complex ethical decisions. This methodologically innovative project aims to reconceptualise ethics support within health protection, a key public health subspecialty, so that it is fit for the significant challenges it is likely to face in the future. The projects aims are to: 1. Analyse health protection ethics challenges in practice 2. Develop and justify what good public health ethics support in practice should entail 3. Design a context-responsive ethics support intervention for health protection 4. Build an evidence basis for the ethics support intervention 5. Develop a model for integrated ethics research at the intersection of health protection practice and academic research. As one of the few clinical academics bridging public health and ethics, I am uniquely positioned to lead this research. Drawing on methods in empirical ethics and public health, this project will reimagine public health ethics to better serve professionals in the field, transform approaches to ethical decision-making in health protection, and develop new methodologies for designing and evaluating bioethics support.