Business of healthcare under the microscope
The third meeting of the Centre for Evidence and Values in Healthcare brought doctors, dentists, vets and senior policymakers to Edinburgh to examine how money shapes the care patients receive.
Chaired by Centre co-founder, Professor Frank Sullivan, an academic general practitioner, Chair in Primary Care Medicine, the fully booked event brought together people from medicine, dentistry and veterinary practice to discuss how contracts and commercial pressures can affect professional judgement.
Speakers looked at the growing influence of private finance on public services and asked how contracts can be designed to keep the public good at the centre of decision-making.
The University of St Andrews Business School’s Professor Kevin Orr is Chair in Leadership and Governance and a founder of the Centre. He said:
“How we pay for healthcare shapes the care people receive. The contracts behind a service are never neutral – they carry assumptions about what we value, and they can protect the public good or quietly erode it. Bringing doctors, dentists and vets into the same room lets us compare those pressures and ask sharper questions about how care should be designed and delivered”
Founded in 2025 and based in the School of Medicine, the Centre is deliberately interdisciplinary, bringing together management, medicine and philosophy to improve how evidence and values guide healthcare decisions.
That mix is reflected in its founders: Dr Margaret McCartney, a general practitioner and Senior Lecturer; Professor Sullivan; Professor Orr, who brings the management and governance lens from the Business School; and Dr Joseph Millum, a Senior Lecturer in philosophy and bioethicist. Mrs Katrin Metsis, a doctoral research fellow in the School of Medicine, is Research Assistant, and Claire McBarron is Coordinator. The Della Fish Foundation supports the Centre’s work.
The Centre now plans to develop the themes raised in Edinburgh into a series of published essays.