Recent virtue ethics approaches to evaluating policies regulating medical practice have emphasised the importance of creating virtue-conducive organisational environments to facilitate doctors developing forms of situational awareness involved in practical intelligence in medical practice, and to thereby support doctors acting on virtues such as medical beneficence in this context. In this presentation I argue that virtue ethics can plausibly evaluate medical policy more directly by focusing on the priorities which are centrally involved in each medical virtue, and examining evidence of the impact of a given policy or regulatory change on medically virtuous behaviour, where such behaviour is understood as involving doctors prioritising the relevant considerations in their clinical practice. On this approach, for example, a policy intervention into doctors’ pharmaceutical prescribing behaviour can be evaluated by considering the likely impact of the policy intervention on the disposition to medical beneficence exhibited by doctors, understood as including a core disposition to prioritise their patients’ best interests in the doctor’s prescribing decisions. Also, I distil some generalisable lessons which this policy approach can provide about conceptual links between the priorities of agents and: (i) the nature of medical virtue, and virtue more generally; (ii) the meaning of therapeutic relationships between doctors and patients.