Health Care Ethics (HCE)
HCE 1600 - Embodiment, Life, and Death in Context
0 or 3 Credits
This course is designed for health professions students. It meets the theology ultimate questions requirement and the Identities in Context attribution. Health professionals continually engage ultimate questions. Religious traditions provide context for meaning and purpose in life. What is the meaning of health, disease, disability, and death? What is the origin of life and meaning? How do we live in the face of death and life? This course equips students to engage these questions in a contextualized and compassionate way, drawing on the resources of the Catholic theological tradition, and bringing them into conversation with other religious traditions.
Prerequisite(s): CORE 1500*
* Concurrent enrollment allowed.
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, UUC:Identities in Context, UUC:Theology
HCE 1700 - Death, Disability, Disease, and the Meaning of Life
0 or 3 Credits
This course is designed health professions students. It meets the philosophy ultimate questions requirement as well as the Cura Peronalis-2 attribution. Health professionals continually engage ultimate questions. What is life, what is health, what is disease, disability, and death? How do we confront death and life? Why is there life at all in the universe? This course will equip students to rigorously engage these questions in a systematic and compassionate way, drawing on the sources of various philosophical schools and the Catholic intellectual tradition, bringing them into conversation with the contemporary world and cultures. (Offered in Fall and Spring)
Prerequisite(s): CORE 1500*
* Concurrent enrollment allowed.
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, UUC:Self in Contemplation, UUC:Philosophy
HCE 2010 - Foundations in Clinical Health Care Ethics
3 Credits
This course introduces students to the ethical dimensions of clinical medicine and offers them the basic language and methodology with which to critically examine them. The course format integrates lecture and active case discussion to provide the necessary philosophical grounding and the real-world skills sought by students. The course will provide an introduction to basic ethical theory and various approaches to clinical ethical decision-making. In addition, students will engage particular ethical issues, including truth-telling, informed consent, killing and letting die, conscientious objection and physician-assisted suicide. Students will investigate these issues through weekly in-class case discussion and periodically through written case-analysis.
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc, UUC:Identities in Context
HCE 2050 - Patients as Persons
3 Credits
This course will introduce students to the philosophical and theological foundations of various debates and positions in bioethics, all of which concern how patients in the clinical care or research context ought to be regarded and treated as persons. Students will explore the way that philosophical and theological concepts of personhood have shaped debates concerning major issues in bioethics, including abortion, genetic testing and treatment, euthanasia and end-of-life care, brain death, organ transplantation, disability, biomedical research, as well as the practice of medicine and the healthcare provider-patient relationship. (Offered annually)
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec
HCE 2070 - Health Care Across Difference
3 Credits
Delivering health care to a diverse patient population is complex. This course examines the clinical and ethical dilemmas posed by diversity in health care. Through a series of case studies we will explore how the delivery of care can be impacted by race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, culture, and religion. We will conclude with an examination of the intersection of various forms of diversity in Anne Fadiman’s book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. Students will gain experience working collaboratively on bioethical research, and exploring how their own identity shapes their engagement with health care. (Offered as.
Prerequisite(s): HCE 2010*
* Concurrent enrollment allowed.
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc, UUC:Global Interdependence, UUC:Identities in Context
HCE 2090 - Bioethics in an Interdisciplinary Perspective
3 Credits
This course will consider bioethics from an interdisciplinary perspective: one that draws on research across the university to answer questions of applied ethics in health care. We will begin by discussing why bioethics is interdisciplinary, and consider examples of research that integrates scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Then we will conduct an extended case study of how different academic disciplines approach the same topic: the “right to die.” Students will write several short papers designed to develop their skills at synthesizing research from diverse academic disciplines, as well as one individual interdisciplinary research paper. (Offered as.
Prerequisite(s): HCE 2010*
* Concurrent enrollment allowed.
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc
HCE 2930 - Special Topics
3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec
HCE 2980 - Independent Study in Health Care Ethics
1-3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec
HCE 3010 - Ethics in Clinical Medicine
3 Credits
This course examines ethical issues encountered medicine, specifically by physicians and residents. It employs a case-based approach with supplementary readings on the general principles of biomedical ethics. Clinical problems related to the practice of medicine will be examined contextually, with attention to institutional, cultural, and moral issues that undergird controversies in clinical ethics.
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc
HCE 3020 - Catholic Theological Bioethics
3 Credits
Examine ethical issues in health care & medicine through the lens of Catholic theological bioethics. Engage specific teachings of Catholic moral tradition and the magisterium that bear directly on issues of HCE & medicine, including reproductive-technologies, contraception, abortion, genetics, allocation of resources, organ-transplantation, end-of-life decision making, euthanasia, and physician-assisted-suicide. Attention to differing or opposing viewpoints, approaches of issues from Catholic theological bioethicists. Narratives by theologians with first-hand experiences will be included. Course format integrating lecture, videos & active case discussions will provide an understanding of principles and give opportunity to develop practical dilemma-solving skills.
Attributes: Catholic Studies-Theology, Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, Theology BA Requirement (A&S), Theology BS Requirement (A&S), Theology-Religious Ethics, Urban Poverty - Applied, Urban Poverty - Health Care, Urban Poverty - Social Justice
HCE 3030 - Disability Studies: Medicine, Ethics, and Policy
3 Credits
This course will introduce undergraduates to disability studies. We will begin by detailing studies as an outgrowth of disability rights. We will then discuss contemporary topics in the field. We will conclude by analyzing disability in bioethics. Students will learn to apply disability studies in medicine, ethics, and policy.
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc, UUC:Identities in Context
HCE 3040 - Mindfulness & the Ethics of Healthcare
3 Credits
This course discusses research findings in the field of mindfulness, specifically, as it relates to health care ethics and education. We will study mindfulness as both an emerging science and embodied practice. Students will explore critically the impact of mindfulness on various health professions. Through collaboration with campus partners from the SLU School of Medicine and the Doisy College of Health Sciences, mindfulness meditation and resiliency training will be practices in an effort to create balance within the pre-health pathway, and to prepare ethically conscious future healthcare providers. Ultimately, their grounding in mindfulness will allow students to more critically and comprehensively engage their own development as future healthcare providers. This class will be of particular interest to students contemplating futures in medicine, physical therapy, physician assistance, nursing, etc. Course offered in fall and spring.
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec
HCE 3050 - Bioethics in Popular Culture
3 Credits
This course covers bioethical topics as depicted in various pop culture media, including abortion, genetic testing, cloning, stem cell research, euthanasia, and end-of-life care, biomedical research, public health, and the healthcare provider-patient relationship. Pop culture media utilized include documentaries, sci-fi television shows, medical dramas, literature, and music.
Prerequisite(s): HCE 2010
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec
HCE 3060 - Plague Ethics: from the Black Death to COVID-19
3 Credits
When plagues happen, they seem to change everything, including our sense of what is right. This course examines the challenge plagues pose to ethics. We begin with a study of how the “black death” transformed morality in medieval and early modern Europe. Then, we examine the ethical questions plague raises through a series of historical case studies. We conclude by exploring how bioethics has confronted plague, with a focus on the recent case of COVID-19. Throughout the semester, brief “literary interludes” will emphasize the seemingly paradoxical opportunities that plague brings to reexamine what it means to live ethically. (Offered occasionally)
Prerequisite(s): HCE 2010
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc, UUC:Global Interdependence
HCE 3200 - Freaks and the Medical Body
3 Credits
It is often said that knowledge is power. This course explores the way that knowledge, scientia, is power by examining the way in which medical science brings legitimacy to certain forbidden spectacles. The course will do so by examining the history of the freak show and how medical science legitimated the use of “deformed” persons for the acquisition and distribution of knowledge. In the second part of the course, we will examine the participation of medicine in the “freak shows” of our time. We will also explore the way in which medicine shapes our contemporary understanding of aesthetics and ethics.
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc, UUC:Identities in Context
HCE 3220 - The Desire to Dissect: Philosophical History of Anatomical Dissection
3 Credits
This course explores the historical and philosophical underpinnings of anatomical dissection in Western medicine. It begins with a comparative history of ancient Greek and Chinese medicine, proceeds to examine the medical and cultural development of anatomical dissection, and concludes with anatomical thinking as the root of modern medical knowing.
Prerequisite(s): HCE 2010
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec
HCE 3230X - Race, Gender, and the Ethics of Health Care
3 Credits
This course uses a multidisciplinary perspective to examine unequal access to and treatment by the health care system in the U.S. Without discounting other social identities, we will focus on race/ethnicity and gender as major determinants of people's disparate experiences with health care. The course will analyze aspects of the health care system that routinely give rise to these experiences, and examine how they help produce and perpetuate racial and gender inequality. The course will also raise questions about what counts as justice and individual rights, and discuss current policies and conditions through an ethical lens.
Attributes: UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc, UUC:Identities in Context
HCE 3240 - Bioethics after Auschwitz
3 Credits
The philosopher Theodor Adorno claimed that “after Auschwitz” the ethical imperative of humanity was to ensure that the Holocaust never happen again. This course examines how bioethics can contribute to that goal. We begin with a history of the Holocaust that focuses on the role of medicine, healthcare, and science in Nazi experimentation, euthanasia, and genocide. We then examine how these events motivated the emergence of bioethics and continue to shape the field. We conclude by examining how bioethicists might respond to mass violence today. Students will write regular postings and a research paper on a topic of their choosing.
Attributes: Global Citizenship (CAS), Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc, UUC:Global Interdependence
HCE 3250 - God in the Clinic? Exploring the Tension Between Spirituality and Health Care
3 Credits
Is spirituality integral to health care or should spirituality be excluded from modern medicine? This course explores the historical, ethical, and practical dimensions of spirituality in health care. It begins with the history of the relationship between religion and medicine, critically examines differing frameworks of spirituality in health care, and ends with students learning how to address issues such as: approaching the suffering patient, navigating miracle language, and doing whole person care at the end of life. Required is a site visit to a religious ceremony.
Prerequisite(s): HCE 2010
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc
HCE 3300 - Bioethics + Human Nature Film
3 Credits
This interactive course uses the medium of film to explore how medicine and biotechnology challenge definitions and conceptualizations of being human. The course will examine the social and cultural dynamics that influence approaches to bioethics in Spain and the United States. Students will consider the ethical dilemmas posed by such diverse practices as abortion, euthanasia, cognitive enhancement/manipulation, and genetic enhancement. The course includes field experiences in Madrid, Spain.
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, Madrid Course
HCE 3930 - Special Topics
3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec
HCE 3980 - Independent Study in Health Care Ethics
1-3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec
HCE 4200 - Warriors and Medics
3 Credits
The course studies the thought and lives of warriors and medics in order to understand their values, virtues, and wisdom - not only as these pertain to the struggle with mortality, but also to the human condition generally. This course has a Pre/Corequisite of a 2000-level HCE course OR Junior or Senior standing.
Prerequisite(s): HCE 2010*
* Concurrent enrollment allowed.
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec
HCE 4210 - Controversies in Death and Dying
3 Credits
This course examines different approaches and attitudes to death (including medical, philosophical, psychological and religious) and then deals with particular ethical controversies in death and dying, including physician-assisted suicide, the definition of death, advance directives, futility and adolescent decision-making, engaging arguments on both sides of debates.
Prerequisite(s): HCE 2010*
* Concurrent enrollment allowed.
Attributes: BHS-Adv Clinical Prob Solving, Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc
HCE 4220 - Controversies in Reproductive and Pediatric Ethics
3 Credits
This course is comprised by two units. (1) Reproductive unit examines controversial ethical issues surrounding use of reproductive technology and medicine. Pros and cons are critically discussed. Topics include: the moral-status of the human-embryo, maternal-fetal conflicts, contraception, sterilization, invitro-fertilization, surrogate motherhood, prenatal screening, and use of human embryos for research purposes. (2) Pediatric unit examines foundational issues in pediatric clinical ethics and a number of controversial issues in the field. Both sides of each controversy are critically discussed. Topics include: treatment of extremely premature infants, vaccine refusal, parental authority, adolescent autonomy, enhancement technologies, and disorders of sexual development.
Prerequisite(s): HCE 2010*
* Concurrent enrollment allowed.
Attributes: BHS-Adv Clinical Prob Solving, Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc
HCE 4240 - Ethics and Geriatric Care
3 Credits
This course is designed to introduce undergraduate students to the ethics and practice of geriatric medicine and the spiritual dimensions of end-of-life care. In addition to weekly seminar discussions, students will spend three hours each week volunteering, shadowing and engaging with residents at Beauvais Manor on the Park.
Prerequisite(s): HCE 2010*; CORE 1500*; (CORE 1000 or UUC Ignite Seminar Waiver with a minimum score of S)
* Concurrent enrollment allowed.
Attributes: BHS-Service Learning, Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, Medical Humanities, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc, UUC:Reflection-in-Action
HCE 4250 - Law and Bioethics
3 Credits
This course will examine the ethical and jurisprudential issues related to areas of health care typically included in the field of bioethics. The course will introduce students to the leading ethico-legal approaches in analyzing cases and examining the judicial history and politics that gave rise to these. This course has a Pre/Corequisite of a 2000-level HCE course OR Junior or Senior standing.
Prerequisite(s): HCE 2010*
* Concurrent enrollment allowed.
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, Medical Humanities
HCE 4260 - Race and Research Ethics
3 Credits
This course will explore the troubling history of the relationship between the American medical research establishment and African Americans and other American minorities. Moving from slavery in the antebellum South to the present day, this course will focus on both the historical and current dynamics between African Americans and scientific research in the United States. In doing so, this class will explore the fraught experiences of minorities as research objects, as research subjects, and as researchers themselves. Topics will not only be addressed in regard to particular cases, but also will be contextualized based on the evolving ethics of the research environment they occurred in. Finally, this class will provide an opportunity to actively engage the current state of affairs by constructing potential solutions and envisioning different future trajectories of this fraught relationship.
Prerequisite(s): HCE 2010*
* Concurrent enrollment allowed.
Attributes: BHS-Humanities, Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, Medical Humanities, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc, Diversity in the US (A&S)
HCE 4270 - Controversies in Organ Donation
3 Credits
This course will examine controversies surrounding organ donation and transplantation. Topics will include: the significance (or insignificance) of ensuring donors of vital organs are dead; appropriate criteria for determining death; the significance (or insignificance) of explicit authorization of donors for donation after death; the appropriateness (or inappropriateness) of incentives for living donation and for donation after death; the ethical character of organ marketing; appropriate treatment of potential donors who are minors or who lack decision-making capacity; and appropriate allocation of organs.
Prerequisite(s): HCE 2010*
* Concurrent enrollment allowed.
Attributes: BHS-Adv Clinical Prob Solving, Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc
HCE 4280 - Controversies in Neuroethics
3 Credits
Neuroethics was born of necessity to grapple with the ethical dimensions of advances in neuroscience. This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to diverse topics within Neuroethics, providing students with a forum for discussion. The field can be divided into the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics. Ethics of neuroscience examines moral concerns around developments in neuroscience. Neuroscience of ethics examines how advances in neuroscience bear on traditional questions in philosophy. The course will explore both domains and work toward student ability to discuss these controversial questions with respect for different opinions.
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec, Neuroscience - Humanities
HCE 4290 - Race, Ethnicity, and Medicine
3 Credits
This course examines historical and current accounts of unethical treatment suffered by patients, physicians, and medical students belonging to a minority racial or ethnic group. We survey key historical instances of egregious abuse African American patients and research subjects have suffered at the hands of clinicians and clinical researchers, and then consider contemporary instances of problematic treatment experienced by racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. We evaluate competing ideas regarding the role of race in medicine and ideas for how to alleviate racial and ethnic injustice experienced in medical institutions and in clinical or clinical research settings.
Prerequisite(s): Minimum Earned Credits of 60
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec
HCE 4400X - Em(body)ing Inequity: Marginalized in the Medical Sciences
3 Credits
This course examines the existing forms of systemic sexism and racism in the medical sciences from multiple perspectives including the patient experience, healthcare worker perspectives, prescription drug trials, and the medical research—through a historical and sociological lens. Taking an intersectional approach, we will discover the history between medical sciences with racism and eugenics, male-centeredness, and heteronormativity. The course will also take a close look at the history of women's reproductive healthcare as it relates racism, such as the birth control pill, maternal mortality rates, forced sterilizations, perceptions of pain, and access to healthcare.
Attributes: Social Science Req (A&S), UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc, UUC:Social & Behavioral Sci, Women's & Gender Studies
HCE 4500 - Ethics in Nursing& Health Care
3 Credits
This course offers an overview of ethical theory, principles, and norms which should inform professional nursing practice. The meaning of nursing as a profession is studied as a source of ethical obligation for the nurse. Cases which arise in the practice of nursing are analyzed and evaluated in light of the identified ethical theory, principles, and norms.
Prerequisite(s): HCE 2010*
* Concurrent enrollment allowed.
Restrictions:
Enrollment limited to students with a classification of Senior.
Enrollment limited to students in the Valentine School of Nursing college.
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec
HCE 4520 - Ethics and Practice of Community Mental Health Care
3 Credits
How can we create communities that support mental health? This course will examine this question in collaboration with the Independence Center, a community-based rehabilitation program for adults with severe and persistent mental illnesses. Students will volunteer at the center and meet there for classes focused on assigned readings. They will study the center’s unique treatment modality, its relation to the larger community mental health movement, and the role of “community” in bioethical debates about mental illness. Students will collaboratively explore how to build communities that support mental health through a group project on a topic of their choosing.
Prerequisite(s): HCE 2010; Minimum Earned Credits of 60; (CORE 1000 or UUC Ignite Seminar Waiver with a minimum score of S); CORE 1500*
* Concurrent enrollment allowed.
Attributes: UUC:Collaborative Inquiry, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc, UUC:Reflection-in-Action
HCE 4930 - Special Topics
3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec
HCE 4960 - Bioethics and Health Studies Capstone
3 Credits
This course will guide students in the creation of a capstone paper, the topic of which will be determined via consultation between the student and the instructor. The course itself will begin with two weeks of introductory readings on interdisciplinary methodologies in bioethics. Students will then begin writing their papers. They will do so in stages, sharing their work in weekly “writing workshops” with the instructor and each other. In addition to the paper, students will complete a series of assignments—a public defense, mock job talk, and “transition paper”—designed to assist them in transitioning from undergraduates to professionals.
HCE 4980 - Advanced Independent Study in Health Care Ethics
3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)
Prerequisite(s): HCE 2010*
* Concurrent enrollment allowed.
Attributes: Health Care Ethics Minor Elec
HCE 5330 - Research Ethics for Health Outcomes
1 Credit
This course provides students with an understanding of the principles of ethics in scientific research. Students will gain an understanding of responsible conduct of research including the importance of ethical decision-making and identification of rules, responsibilities, and resources for responsible conduct. Topics include informed consent, research misconduct, policies in human subjects research, data management and data sharing, and dealing with conflicts of interest.
HCE 5500 - Ethics in Nursing& Health Care
2 Credits
This course offers an overview of ethical theory, principles, and norms that should inform professional nursing practice. It explores ethical issues and challenges commonly faced by nurses. Cases that arise in the practice of nursing are systematically analyzed.
Attributes: MPH-Health Management & Policy
HCE 5930 - Special Topics
1-3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)
HCE 5950 - Consuming the Empirical Literature Exam
0 Credits (Repeatable up to 9 credits)
HCE 5960 - Masters Capstone Project
0 Credits (Repeatable for credit)
This course is a highly individualized normative research project, culminating in master's-level paper in health care ethics.
HCE 5980 - Graduate Independent Study in Health Care Ethics
1-3 Credits
HCE 6010 - Methods in Philosophical Ethics
3 Credits
A study of the methodological issues in philosophy concerning the nature and justification of fundamental ethical norms, including: philosophical ethics and non-philosophical disciplines; philosophical methods of justifying ethical norms; Kantian ethics; contractarian ethics; virtue ethics; ethics and psychobiology; different methods of justification; epistemological status of ethics. Cross-listed with PHIL 6300 and THEO 5650.
HCE 6020 - Methods in Religious Ethics
3 Credits
A study of the hermeneutical significance of different methods in religious ethics and a critical analysis of the hermeneutical implications of these methods for the development of ethical theory.
HCE 6040 - Interdisciplinary Research in Health Care Ethics
3 Credits
A study of the scope, concerns, and methods of interdisciplinary research in Health Care Ethics, including: interdisciplinary research methods with associated competencies; cross-cultural paradigms of person, community, and health; epistemological processes for interdisciplinary research; criteria for persuasion and ethical justification in interdisciplinary research.
HCE 6050 - Philosophical Foundations
3 Credits
This course will survey both current and contemporary thinking in ethics with the goal of understanding various ethical systems in their philosophical and historical context. Students will read primary texts from classical and contemporary thinkers like Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Mill, Nussbaum, MacIntyre, Rawls, and Singer. Where appropriate examples from contemporary health care ethics will be used to clarify points. Students will be encouraged to write papers that engage contemporary problems in health care ethics with one or more of the philosophical thinkers in mind.
HCE 6070 - Foundations of Catholic Morality
3 Credits
This course explores basic themes of the Catholic moral tradition such as the human person as a moral agent, human freedom, the role and rights of conscience, the importance of virtue in the moral life, natural law, the use of Scripture in moral theology and the importance of human experience in the moral life. Particular attention will be given to the development of the moral tradition. Cross-listed with THEO 5680.
HCE 6110 - Intro-Medicine for Ethicists
1 Credit
A study of the principles and practice of medicine as a framework for ethical discourse, including: the classification and etiology of diseases (e.g. genetic diseases); their clinical manifestations and complications (e.g. the use of imaging techniques); and principles of medical and surgical treatment (e.g. life support systems).
HCE 6120 - Bioethics and the Law
2 Credits
This course examines legal issues in health care decision making in areas typically considered a part of bioethics, such as organ transplantation, genetic medicine, end-of-life care, determination of death, and experimentation with human subjects. While the course focuses on cases, statues and regulations applicable to these issues, the course also studies the leading approaches in ethics as they are applied in these situations. The course includes consideration of the primary processes used for dispute resolution in bioethics, including litigation , institutional ethics committees, and institutional review boards.
HCE 6130 - Clinical Ethics
3 Credits
A study of fundamental skills and core areas of knowledge essential for ethics consultation, integrating process and outcomes, to identify, analyze, and resolve ethical dilemmas, cases and issues, that emerge in the context of patient care.
HCE 6140 - Research Ethics
3 Credits
This course introduces students to a range of topics in research ethics. The focus of the course is academic human subjects research ethics, though issues of regulation and compliance will be discussed throughout. For each topic selected, there will be four main study elements: (1) identify the ethical issues that emerge; (2) identify the major ethical arguments concerning these issues; (3) assess the major arguments; (4) examine the relevance of these issues and arguments to particular instances of human subjects research.
HCE 6150 - Practicum, Health Care Ethics
1-3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)
This practicum engages students in medical care settings with these goals: to experience a wide range of acute clinical care; to observe the patient/family/caregiver dynamics involved in clinical care; to reflect critically on the ethical challenges and principles involved in these patient care settings.
HCE 6310 - Health Care Ethics: Catholic Tradition
3 Credits
This course will examine moral methodology and critical issues in Catholic bioethics, primarily through the lens of four contemporary moral theologians who present differing, sometimes opposing, viewpoints on the subject matter.
HCE 6350 - Pediatric Ethics
3 Credits
This course is a study of the ethical and legal issues that arise in the care of children and adolescents. The course will begin by examining functional issues related to medical decision-making for children, including standards of decision-making and the roles of the parent and the state. Special attention will be given to feminist perspectives on bioethics. The course will then explore particular topics of interest in pediatric ethics, including: issues in perinatology and neonatology, vaccinations, pediatric organ donation and pediatric research ethics. Offered in spring.
HCE 6520 - Quantitative Research in Descriptive Ethics
3 Credits
Prerequisites: Enrollment in the quantitative track of the certificate program and RMET650 Multivariate Statistical Analysis. This course provides the opportunity to design and carry out directed, quantitative research in descriptive ethics. The course fosters the development of skills necessary to secure grant funding, to gain Institutional Review Board approval, and to do empirical research that can be integrated into the doctoral dissertation in health care ethics.
HCE 6540 - Advanced Clinical Ethics Practicum
3 Credits
This course provides an extended and immersive clinical ethics experience during which students will obtain the knowledge and skills necessary for ethics consultation. The course consists of two primary components: extended experiential learning within an institutional clinical ethics service and (2) the development of a clinical ethics portfolio, both of which are overseen by an on-site clinical ethics mentor and a faculty member. This course typically takes place over a summer at a pre-arranged internship site.
HCE 6930 - Special Topics
1-3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)
HCE 6980 - Graduate Independent Study in Health Care Ethics
1-3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)
HCE 6990 - Dissertation Research
0-9 Credits (Repeatable for credit)
School of Medicine
HCE 0101 - Foundations in Health Care Ethics
1-10 Credits
The purpose of the health care ethics course for first year medical students is threefold. First, this foundational course is the first in a longitudinal approach to ethics instruction designed to teach students that ethics is not merely a set of rules nor an ancillary part of the medical curriculum that can be set aside when the ethics course is over. Rather, ethics is a central part of medical practice, including how one understands the goals and ends of medicine, how one sees a patient, how one interviews a patient, what are the ethical norms that govern the practice of medicine, and how to work through a clinical ethics dilemma. Second, the core ethics sessions instruct students the practical ethical standards (and some legal standards as well) that govern the practice of medicine. Emphasis will be placed on covering standards that are well entrenched and supported by wide consensus in.
HCE 0102 - Issues in Pediatric Ethics and Vaccination Ethics
3 Credits
This 6 week elective will provide an opportunity for students to learn about ethical analysis and ethical scholarship in medicine. The elective will focus on ethical issues in pediatric ethics and ethical issues related to vaccinations. Through the study of these areas, students will be exposed to different modes of ethical scholarship, analysis of wide-ranging ethical issues, and the application of ethical analysis to medical care and policy.
HCE 0201 - Clinical Reasoning in Health Care Ethics
1-10 Credits (Repeatable for credit)
This course is designed to familiarize students with ethical problems they will encounter during their medical careers. Whereas HCE 0101 provides the “grammar” of clinical ethics, introducing students to general principles, this course is an introduction to the “logic” of ethics, giving students the chance to apply such principles to clinical cases, just as they do in learning the principles of pathophysiology. The course is longitudinal and integrated into the other courses of the second year. The purpose of this design is to avoid allowing students to think of ethics as something external to clinical practice. Rather, ethical practice lies at the heart of medicine, and students must learn to think of themselves as moral agents even as they learn how to diagnose and treat patients.
HCE 0401 - Directed Readings in Bioethics
2-12 Credits (Repeatable for credit)
This independent study course allows the student to investigate particular issues in ethics that appeal to the student, building where appropriate on previous courses in philosophy, healthcare ethics or medical humanities. The student is encouraged to examine an issue which has already been encountered in study or is anticipated to be encountered in future practice.