Translational bioethics has emerged in response to the enduring challenge of bridging the theory-practice divide in ethics. One translational approach is to embed ethical analysis and other normative work within the practices and structures of institutions. Preventive ethics, understood as anticipatory, systems-oriented interventions that address ethical issues before they arise in individual cases, offers a practical mechanism for achieving this aim.
This paper argues that preventive ethics represents a modality of translational bioethics that institutionalises ethical responsiveness in complex healthcare environments. Preventive ethics operates as governance-oriented ethics work. It includes identifying sources of ethical risks, embedding (and reducing unnecessary) ethical controls such as ethics review into organisational workflows, and fostering collaboration across disciplines and leadership to address the root cause of recurring ethical issues.
Using an example of an integrated ethics model developed within a Singapore public healthcare cluster, the paper illustrates how translational bioethics can be operationalised through risk governance, ethics culture building, and the proactive development of clinical and ethics services. Preventive ethics is thus framed as a translational strategy that connects bioethical scholarship to the priorities and structural realities of healthcare delivery. The paper will also discuss the practical importance of devalued tools such as ethical checklists, and an “implementation-first” approach to bioethics research and publication that priorities the collection of evidence for real-world outcomes as the foundation for practical normative analysis.