What sets the Department's PhD program apart?
We are dedicated to excellence in both secular and religious discourse. As a part of Saint Louis University, a premier Jesuit institution, The Department of Health Care Ethics brings the Catholic, Jesuit tradition into interdisciplinary discourse with health care. This mission commits us to religious as well as secular philosophical and legal bioethics discourse. Our modes of discourse reflect our traditions of service. The Department has a long history of serving faith-based health care institutions through consultations and educational programs. It also engages in government-funded research projects and the education of students with varied worldviews.
Our faculty and programs are interdisciplinary. The Department's full-time faculty includes people with terminal degrees in law, medicine, philosophy, psychology, and theology. Affiliated faculty additionally hold terminal degrees in health care ethics, public health, and research methodology. Health care ethics has become its own field, but much like the field of public health, it will always require expertise across many disciplines.
Our educational programs emphasize the development of professional skills. Reading the literature in bioethics does not require mastery of ancient languages, but it does require mastery of search engines and databases like Medline, knowledge of medical terminology, and reading knowledge of research methods and statistics. Students in the PhD Program are required to develop these research skills while completing coursework on philosophical, religious, and interdisciplinary methods in ethics and on the legal, administrative, and medical contexts of the field. Doctoral students may additionally pursue a Certificate in Empirical Research Methods to develop the skills needed to gather data using interviews, focus groups, or surveys.
The Department offers MD/PhD and JD/PhD dual degree programs. These dual degree programs enable students to pursue the PhD in health care ethics while completing professional training in law or medicine.
We are a self-standing academic department. We are an academic department that reports directly to the Graduate School at Saint Louis University. In addition to collaborating with faculty in other departments and local corporate ethicists, The Department has its own full-time faculty of health care ethicists.
Department of Health Care Ethics
Mailing Address: Department of Health Care Ethics
221 North Grand Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63103-2006
Campus address: O'Brien Hall, Frost Campus
Telephone: (314) 977-6661
Fax: (314) 977-5150
