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Staff profile

Overview

Professor Emma Cave

Professor of Healthcare Law

Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Professor of Healthcare Law in the Durham Law School+44 (0) 191 33 42829
Director in the Durham CELLS (Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences)
Fellow of the Institute for Medical Humanities
Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing

Biography

Emma Cave is a Professor of Healthcare Law, legal scholar and Director of the Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences. She works on emerging biotechnologies and legal aspects of medical treatment. Interdisciplinary in approach, her work bridges science and its clinical application. She has worked alongside health professionals, scientists, philosophers, sociologists and economists and with policy-makers, professional regulators, think-tanks and Parliamentarians.

Legal aspects of medical treatment

Past research projects have examined the medical treatment of critically ill children, the adequacy of ethical advice in the COVID-19 pandemic (funded by the British Academy) and the implications of the Supreme Court judgment Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board [2015] on informed consent (funded by the ESRC IAA). She held a Scottish Parliament Academic Fellowship to produce a Scottish Parliament Information Centre Briefing on information consent. Much of her specialist advice focuses on translating this research beyond academia.

Advisory roles

She has advised the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee as a core member of their Independent Expert Panel on transition from child to adult care (2026), palliative care (2026), patient safety (2025), pharmacy (2024) and digitisation of the NHS (2023). She has informed public inquiries as a member of the ethics advisory group to the COVID-19 Inquiry (2024-6) and as a co-convenor of the medical ethics report to the Infected Blood Inquiry in 2020. She has contributed on multiple occasions to professional guidance, chairing the GMC's Good Medical Practice Advisory Forum (2022-23), serving on the BMA's Medical Ethics Committee (from 2024 to present) and as working group member producing guidance on Genetic Testing in Childhood  and involvement of the police following abortion. 

Regulating emerging biotechnologies

She has a longstanding interest in the ethical and regulatory challenges raised by emerging biotechnologies, particularly where scientific innovation tests established legal categories and governance frameworks. She was a member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (2018-21) where she was Deputy Chair of the Statutory Approvals Committee. She chaired the Nuffield Council on Bioethics working group on Stem Cell-Based Embryo Models (2024-25) and subsequently sat on their working group on the 14-Day Rule for Human Embryo Culture. Her approach emphasises proportionate, transparent and publicly accountable regulation, attentive both to scientific potential and to the ethical limits of permissible research.

Research interests

  • Health law
  • Particularly consent, capacity and compulsion

Esteem Indicators

  • 2024: Chair of Nuffield Council on Bioethics Working Group on Stem Cell-Based Embryo Models: The Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCOB) has started a rapid review project to assess and advise on the ethical and regulatory issues raised by research using human stem cell-based embryo models
  • 2023 - 2026: Member of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry Ethics Advisory Group: The UK Covid-19 Inquiry has announced the creation of an independent Ethics Advisory Group to ensure its UK-wide listening exercise, Every Story Matters, maintains the highest ethical standards. The Group, with expertise in social research ethics and practice, provides an independent review of the design and approach of Every Story Matters and is chaired by David Archard, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast.
  • 2022: Core member of the Health and Social Care Committee's Expert Panel: The Health and Social Care Committee is a Select Committee of the House of Commons. It has established an Expert Panel to support its work by issuing independent evaluations on specific areas such as Digital Transformation in the NHS (2022) and Pharmacy Services (2023). I am one of the core members, appointed in 2022. For each evaluation additional members with specific expertise join the panel.
  • 2021 - 2023: Chair of the General Medical Council's Good Medical Practice Advisory Forum: The GMC is the independent regulator for medical professionals. The GMC's core guidance, Good Medical Practice, sets out the standards of patient care and professional behaviour expected of all medical professionals registered with the GMC. GMP was last reviewed in 2013. To help the GMC review GMP, an advisory forum was set up comprising 12 experts from outside of the GMC. We met several times over the review period to guide the GMC on specific aspects of the review. A public consultation was held in 2022 and then the new guidance was published in 2023, coming into force in 2024.
  • 2020 - 2023: Co-Convenor of Medical Ethics Group report to the Infected Blood Inquiry: The Infected Blood Inquiry is an independent public statutory Inquiry established to examine the circumstances in which men, women and children treated by national Health Services in the United Kingdom were given infected blood and infected blood products, in particular since 1970. The 130 pp Medical Ethics expert report was published in April 2020. It discusses the ethical principles that should govern and inform clinical decision-making. It was commissioned primarily to inform the Inquiry’s questioning of clinicians in future hearings. The report is based on letters of instruction given to the Group by the Inquiry which had input from core participants. Many of the questions and responses relate to general medical ethics and are not necessarily specific to issues of infected blood and blood products, hepatitis, HIV or blood and bleeding disorders.
  • 2018 - 2021: Member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and Deputy Chair of the Statutory Approvals Committee: The HFEA is the UK’s independent regulator of fertility treatment and research using human embryos. A world-class expert organisation in the fertility sector, the HFEA was the first statutory body of this type in the world. The Statutory Approvals Committee decides what conditions can be tested for using a type of embryo screening called Pre-implantation genetic testing for monogenic disorders (PGT-M) and considers applications for mitochondrial donation treatment and Human Leucocyte Antigen (HLA) tissue typing. It also issues ‘special directions’, which are rules we can issue to clinics to govern how they import or export sperm, eggs, or embryos or use a new fertility treatment or technique.
  • 2017: Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Authority:
  • 2013: Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing:
  • 2013: Member of the Society of Legal Scholars:

Publications

Authored book

Chapter in book

Journal Article

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

Report

Supervision students

Eleanor Drover

Rachel Jenkins

Tutorials (Ptt)