The ICMM Centre of Reference for Education on IHL and Ethics, the Medical Services Directorate of the Swiss Armed Forces, and the Zurich Center for Military Medical Ethics are pleased to announce their co- organized 11th Workshop on Military Medical Ethics:
The Future of Military Health Care – Utopian and Dystopian Prospects
on the Role of (Military) Health Care Providers
It will take place from 16-18 June 2022 at the Hotel Seaside (Spiez, CH) and as a hybrid event.
We invite presentations by academics and researchers as well as military and humanitarian health care providers. Deadline for abstract submissions is 31 January 2022.
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The dates of our courses and workshops in 2022 have now been confirmed as follows:
11th Workshop on Military Medical Ethics: 16.-18.06.2022
The 11th Workshop on Military Medical Ethics will take place from 16-18 June 2022.
It shall be organized as a hybrid event with an on-site workshop for up to 30 participants at the Hotel Seaside in Spiez (Switzerland) and the additional possibility to join the workshop online.
22nd LoAC and 10th MME Courses in Spiez (Switzerland): 28.08.-01.09.2022
Both courses will take place from 28 August to 01 September 2022 at the Hotel Seaside in Spiez (Switzerland). In addition to the on-site courses in Spiez, both courses will also offer the opportunity for an online participation.
The LoAC course will have 1 online and 1 on-site class.
The MME course will have a hybrid class with up to 12 on-site participants and up to 10 additional online participants.
- Details regarding the conditions for the participation will be published soon and announced via our newsletter.
- Registration will open in late 2021, you can also preregister by writing an email to
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We hope that we can welcome many new and old course and workshop participants in Switzerland again.
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We are glad to announce that the second volume of our book series on Military and Humanitarian Health Ethics is currently in production and should be available in book shops.
The new book is entitled Health Care in Contexts of Risk, Uncertainty, and Hybridity and contributors discuss various ethical challenges that military and humanitarian health care personnel (HCP) face while working in adverse conditions. Contexts of armed conflict, hybrid wars or other forms of violence short of war, as well as natural disasters, all have in common that ordinary circumstances can no longer be taken for granted. This affects the practice of health care as well as its ethics.
The book offers a panoramic overview on various ethical challenges healthcare faces in extraordinary situations and provides new insights from practitioners’ as well as from academic scholars’ perspectives.
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The 10th workshop will take place as an Online Workshop via zoom from 26-28 April 2021 due to the ongoing travel restrictions and the situation with regard to COVID-19. The topical subject of the workshop will be
Medical Rules of Eligibility and
Medical Care under Resource Scarcity
The workshop is, as usual, co-organized by the ICMM Centre of Reference for Education on IHL and Ethics, the Medical Services Directorate of the Swiss Armed Forces, and the Zurich Center for Military Medical Ethics.
Places at the workshop are limited as we want to keep the format of the workshop as close as possible to the previous years, which includes time and opportunity for discussions. Participants will be selected with the aim of putting together a well-balanced group of speakers and participants to allow for productive discussions.
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The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic raises a number of important ethical questions, which may also emerge in the work of military health care personnel (HCP) as they are often part of the response to the pandemic. Therefore, the ICMM and its Center of Reference for Education on IHL and Ethics (RefC) in cooperation with the ZH Center for Military Medical Ethics (CMME) have decided to provide some guidance and resources on how to deal with the ethical issues.
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The book with the title "Ethics of Medical Innovation, Experimentation, and Enhancement in Military and Humanitarian Contexts" is now available as PDF and epub via Springer (LINK). The printed version is due to be published in April and will then also be available via your local bookstore or online book stores.
This book (edited by D. Messelken and D. Winkler) discusses ethical questions surrounding research and innovation in military and humanitarian contexts. It focuses on human enhancement in the military. Recently, the availability of medical enhancement designed to make soldiers more capable of surviving during conflict, as well as enabling them to defeat their enemies, has emerged. Innovation and medical research in military and humanitarian contexts may thus yield positive effects, but simultaneously leads to a number of highly problematic ethical issues.
The work contains contributions on medical ethics that take into account the specific roles and obligations of military and humanitarian health care providers and the ethical problems they encounter. They cover different aspects of research and innovation such as vaccine development, medical enhancement, compassionate and experimental drug use, research and application of new technologies such as wearables, “Humanitarian innovation” to cope with scarce resources, Biometrics, big data, etc.The book is of interest and importance to researchers and policy makers involved with human enhancement, medical research, and innovation in military and humanitarian missions.
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Did you know that we take part in a project that creates an online collection of scenarios for training and research in military medical ethics?
The aim of this MME scenario collection is to provide deploying military medical personnel and those who organise trainging and education with a tool to better prepare for future missions. In order to do so, we collect and make available cases, experiences, reports, and scenarios in a neutral database. In order for the colletion to grow, we hope that we can convince those returning from missions to (anonymously or not) contribute their experiences and share it with others.
- Access the MME Scenario Collection via https://scenarios.militarymedicalethics.ch
If you want to learn more, the International Review of the Armed Forces Medical Services has published an article that describes the MME Scenario Collection. You can read the article online via the following links:
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