King's College London

Healthcare workers in crisis and conflict settings are likely to face multiple ethical challenges. Our programme studies the fields of military and military healthcare ethics (MHE). It is a discrete programme of work within the KCL Centre for Military Ethics, hosted within the Defence Studies Department of KCL and is based at the UK Defence Academy at Shrivenham. The programme in MHE was established in 2018 and focussed on the development of two packs of MHE playing cards and a smartphone App (over 3,000 users from 159 countries have downloaded the App since 2020.

Our team has developed a suite of educational resources to support education in military ethics which have been used in a variety of teaching environments with partners in the United Kingdom (UK), Jordan, Columbia, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) Military Healthcare Working Group, the NATO Centre of Excellence for Military Medicine, the International Committee of Military Medicine (ICMM) Center of Reference for Education on IHL and Ethics, and the Kofi Annan United National Peacekeeping Training Centre, Ghana. The KCME team has also supported the development of a NATO policy for military healthcare ethics that was published in June 2025.

Key resources:

• NATO AMedP 8.19 Military Healthcare Ethics
  https://www.coemed.org/files/stanags/03_AMEDP/AMedP-8.19_EDA_V1_E_6562.pdf
• Centre for Military Ethics: https://militaryethics.uk/en/
• Bricknell M, Story R. An overview to military medical ethics. Journal of Military and Veterans Health. 2022 Apr 1;30(2):7-16.
  https://jmvh.org/article/an-overview-to-military-medical-ethics/
• Conflict & Health Journal ‘Attacks on Healthcare’ series with Geneva Centre for Humanitarian Studies
  https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/AOH