Professor Michael Loughlin

Michael Loughlin is a Professor in Applied Philosophy and Director of the University of West London's European Institute for Person-Centred Health and Social Care. He is Course Leader for the MSc in Person-Centred Health and Social Care. He is also an Academic Visitor at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, University of Oxford Medical School.

He has written extensively on the relationship between knowledge, science and value in clinical practice, applying arguments developed in his PhD (on the relationship between epistemology and ethics) and early publications in philosophy to analyse the nature and role of rationality, evidence, judgement and intuition in medicine and health care.

His early work (including a 2002 book, Ethics, Management and Mythology) raised methodological questions about quality measures, bioethics and the use of evidence in health policy. He has written many articles in academic journals and popular media and addressed international audiences of practitioners and policy-makers on evidence-based practice and person-centred care. He has co-authored policy documents and advised professional groups on the philosophical education of practitioners.  In 2014 he was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the European Society for Person Centered Healthcare and awarded the Senior Vice President's Medal for Excellence, for his foundational work in the Philosophy of Person-Centred Care.

As Associate Editor of the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, he has edited several special issues on philosophical aspects of health care.  He is the editor of Debates in Values-based Practice: Arguments for and Against (Cambridge University Press, 2014). His recent work on medical epistemology has raised questions about scientism and moral realism, defending a humanistic conception of rationality and science in practice. In 2020 he was appointed Project Director of the Literature Database Programme, at the Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice, St Catherine's College, University of Oxford.

His most recent book, published in 2023, is The Philosophy of Person-Centred Healthcare, co-authored with the philosopher and patient advocate Dr Derek Mitchell and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

In 2024, he was appointed the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice.