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This paper aims to interrogate the potential and challenges in interdisciplinary working across disciplinary boundaries by examining a longitudinal partnership designed to research student experiences of digital technologies in undergraduate medicine established by the authors of this paper (one from Education and the other from Medical Education). The paper is situated in current methodological trends including the changing value of replicability and evidence-based methods and increases in qualitative and mixed methods studies in medical education, whilst education research has seen growing encouragement for randomized controlled trials and large-scale quantitative studies. A critical analysis of the partnership interactions is framed by Holland's positional and imagined identities, negotiated across "figured" worlds and the concept of epistemic games that guide knowledge construction. We consider social, political and cultural challenges; and how "in-between" sites of knowledge were established where the academic identity of each was shaped by engaging with the other and new theoretical, methodological and ethical understandings were co-constructed. The paper concludes that despite the ongoing challenges, "bottom-up" partnerships can contribute to a growth in interdisciplinarity which might itself be understood as a boundary object. Interdisciplinarity necessitates improvisation and boundary crossing and can, therefore, always be considered a matter of negotiation, creativity and collaboration.

Vaccination plays an important role in pandemic planning and response. The possibility of developing an effective vaccine for a novel pandemic virus is not assured. However, as we have seen with SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development, with sufficient resources and global focus, successful outcomes can be achieved in a relatively short period. However even when vaccine is available it will initially be scarce. When one becomes available, how should it be distributed? In this paper we explicate how ethical thinking that is carefully attuned to context is essential to decisions about how we should conduct vaccination in a pandemic where demand exceeds supply. We focus on two key issues. First, setting the aims for a pandemic vaccination programme. Second, thinking about the means of delivering a chosen aim. We outline how pandemic vaccine distribution strategies can be implemented with distinct aims, e.g. protecting groups at greater risk of harm, saving the most lives, or ensuring societal benefit. Each aim will result in a focus on a different priority population and each strategy will have a different benefit-harm profile. Once we have decided our aim, we still have choices to make about delivery. We may achieve at least some ends via direct or indirect strategies. Such policy decisions are not merely technical, but necessarily involve ethics. One important general issue is that such planning decisions about distribution will always be made under conditions of uncertainty about vaccine safety and effectiveness. However, planning how to distribute vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 is even harder because we understand relatively little about the virus, transmission, and its immunological impact in the short and long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade ‘social egg freezing’ has emerged as a technology of hope that purports to empower women by enabling them to continue their careers or find the right partner without the fear of jeopardising their fertility. This technology has been promoted and celebrated by fertility companies, bioethicists, clinicians, and multi-national corporations such as Apple and Facebook. While critical questions have been raised, they tend to focus on ethical and legal issues, such as informed consent and patient autonomy. This paper uses Foucault’s notion ofdispositifas analytic lens to examine the entanglement of the commercial arrangements of fertility companies, the discursive use of hope in promoting these services, and effects on professional medical care. Drawing on socio-political analyses of hope, this paper examines the potential financial conflicts of interest facing clinicians and the way discourses of hope might mask problematic financial relations and lack of evidence of effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to interrogate the potential and challenges in interdisciplinary working across disciplinary boundaries by examining a longitudinal partnership designed to research student experiences of digital technologies in undergraduate medicine established by the authors of this paper (one from Education and the other from Medical Education). The paper is situated in current methodological trends including the changing value of replicability and evidence-based methods and increases in qualitative and mixed methods studies in medical education, whilst education research has seen growing encouragement for randomized controlled trials and large-scale quantitative studies. A critical analysis of the partnership interactions is framed by Holland’s positional and imagined identities, negotiated across ‘figured’ worlds and the concept of epistemic games that guide knowledge construction. We consider social, political and cultural challenges; and how ‘in-between’ sites of knowledge were established where the academic identity of each was shaped by engaging with the other and new theoretical, methodological and ethical understandings were co-constructed. The paper concludes that despite the ongoing challenges, ‘bottom-up’ partnerships can contribute to a growth in interdisciplinarity which might itself be understood as a boundary object. Interdisciplinarity necessitates improvisation and boundary crossing and can, therefore, always be considered a matter of negotiation, creativity and collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ethical principles of avoiding harm and supporting autonomy are relevant to cancer-screening policy. We argue that more attention needs to be given to implementing them. Cancer screening may deliver excessive harms due to low-value or outdated screening programs and from poorly communicated screening options that leave people with heavy burdens of decision-making. Autonomy is inadequately supported due to limited opportunities for people to understand downsides of screening and because of institutional and societal pressures in favour of screening. Members of screening policy committees may have differing ideas about the goals of screening or have conflicts of interest that prevent them from addressing policy questions in a neutral way. We recommend the following: 1. Committees should be required to discern and discuss the values of individual members and the wider public; 2. Committee membership and voting procedures should be more carefully constructed to reduce the likelihood that committee members' interests are placed above public interests; 3. Committees should explain their policy decisions with reference to values as well as evidence, so that values considered in decision-making can be interrogated and challenged if necessary. These changes would increase the likelihood that cancer-screening policy decisions are in keeping with public views about what is important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]