No immediate plans to recruit new Bioethics Officer – Department

There are no plans at “the present time” to recruit a new Chief Bioethics Officer (CBO) at the Department of Health, this newspaper has been told.

The post has remained unfilled since September 2022, when the former CBO Dr Siobhán O’Sullivan left the role.

Dr O’Sullivan was the CBO from 2011 until September 2022.

“At the present time, the Department has no plans to run a [recruitment] competition following on from the 2024 competition where no candidate was appointed,” a Department spokesperson told the Medical Independent (MI).

The CBO is responsible for monitoring the bioethics environment to identify emerging issues and to provide evidence-based policy and legislative advice in the field.

In July 2023, MI reported that the Department was “making arrangements” to recruit a new CBO and may reconstitute a dormant  bioethics advisory committee.

However, the Department spokesperson told this newspaper that the national advisory committee on bioethics (NACB) is no longer a functional committee of the Department.

In the area of bioethics, the Department “continues to engage with relevant expertise, including external, when appropriate”.

The NACB’s most recently published document, Nudging in Public Health – An Ethical Framework, was released in April 2016. The NACB has not met since September 2015 and has not been provided with any new topics to assess.

The NACB was established in 2012 to advise the Minister for Health on the ethical and social implications of scientific developments in human medicine and healthcare.