PhD - Doctor of Philosophy in Healthcare Ethics and DHCE

The Doctoral Curriculum requires twelve courses (36 credits) beyond the Master’s degree. After Comprehensive Exams, both Doctoral Degree Programs require 6 credits of dissertation hours. There is one pre-requisite course (3 credits). If a student’s Master’s degree does not include equivalent courses for the HCE pre-requisite course, the relevant pre-requisite course will be taken in addition to the twelve doctoral courses. Baccalaureate Admission track requires sixteen courses (48 credits) beyond the Baccalaureate Degree. The Ethics Rotation Program is titled, Clinical and Organizational Rotations in Ethics (CORE). The Program provides HCE students with an experience-based curriculum to learn in a supervised, step-by-step manner the scholarly knowledge and professionals skills for providing ethics services in health care. The curriculum focuses upon integrating clinical, organizational, and professional ethics across the health care organization. The program also seeks to provide a Mentored Apprenticeship to train students to undertake clinical ethics consultations, including the pre-consultation phase. The junior rotations (HCE 646, 647) are intensely supervised and occur at UPMC Mercy Hospital which is adjacent to Duquesne University. Typically, ethics rotations and internships may be initiated after completion of 18 credit hours of course work. The DHCE degree is a professional degree that combines academic and clinical education to train students in a systematic and critical manner to be clinically oriented professionals in the field. Hence, the DHCE project is a practical endeavor that focuses upon the appropriate clinical and writing competencies to be successful professionals in the field. A Faculty Committee (Director and Readers) is assigned to supervise the student in the phase of doctoral writing. After the Committee ascertains that the dissertation or project has been completed satisfactorily, there is an oral Doctoral Defense with the following possible outcomes: formal approval or the requirement to resubmit the text based on critiques at the defense. Upon successfully completing the above the student proceeds to Graduation, following the requirements of the University for submitting the doctoral text and planning for graduation. Learning Outcomes: Students can understand, analyze and apply HCE theory and methods to major topics and issues in contemporary healthcare ethics. Students can analyze critically the relationship of HCE with multidisciplinary fields in healthcare (empirical research, law, medicine, philosophy, religion, science and technology) as well as a global enterprise (using research from anthropology, sociology, political sciences and international human rights law). Students can perform independent scholarly research; write scholarly essays and present academic papers that meet the standards of scholarly research in HCE. Students can integrate academic learning with experiential learning in clinical or organizational rotations as a function of service-learning and development as an HCE professional. Students can function as an HCE expert and provide ethical leadership with knowledge, skills, competencies and character traits in diverse settings such as ethics committees, institutional review boards and ethics consultations. Students can foster co-curricular practices for life-long learning to personally value and engage the clinical, organizational and professional components of HCE in a global context.