Catholic Healthcare Ethics

The master’s program in Catholic healthcare ethics focuses on issues of healthcare ethics consistent with the Catholic, Spiritan identity of Duquesne University. 

The university is committed to an atmosphere that is open to diversity to celebrate education for the mind, heart and spirit and to cultivate academic excellence, ethically responsible judgment and social justice in a globalized context. You will explore healthcare ethics through lenses such as social justice, the duty to preserve life, end-of-life decisions and the ethics of human reproduction.

Requirements & the Path to Further Study

The program includes a total of 10 courses (30 credits): Two required courses plus eight courses selected from our Catholic healthcare courses. You may choose the eight other courses according to your interests.  Please see the listing of required courses and elective courses under Program Requirements below.

There is no requirement for a thesis or for a comprehensive examination.

Candidates for the Master of Arts in Catholic healthcare ethics are eligible to receive a Master of Arts Scholarship through the Duquesne University McAnulty College and Graduate School, which can reduce degree costs by 25%. 

If, after earning your M.A. degree, you want to move on to the Ph.D. program, 18 more credits will be required, so that 48 total credits have been completed before you may apply for the comprehensive examination.

 

Program Information

Our M.A. in Catholic Healthcare Ethics explores healthcare from a Catholic perspective, addressing ethically responsible judgment and care. Expand your understanding of healthcare through diverse viewpoints from expert teacher-scholars.

Degree

Masters

School

McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts

Duration

2-year

Required Credit Hours

30

Program Requirements

The master degree programs adopt the following course planner to enable you to track your coursework. All courses are 3 credit hours, and all course selections must be approved by your academic advisor. The two mandatory courses are HCE 749-Empirical Methods in Healthcare Ethics and HCE 759- Normative Methods in Healthcare Ethics. You may choose your remaining courses from the following list of courses or clinical rotations.

The master's level curriculum requires 10 courses (30 credits) from this list.
  • HCE 743 - End of Life Care Ethics
  • HCE 745- Comparative Religious Bioethics
  • HCE 748- Clinical Ethics
  • HCE 749- Empirical Methods in Healthcare Ethics (required)
  • HCE 750- Beginning of Life Ethics
  • HCE 753- Genetics & Ethics
  • HCE 754- Research Ethics
  • HCE 755- Global Bioethics
  • HCE 758- Intensive Research in Healthcare Ethics
  • HCE 759- Normative Methods in Healthcare Ethics (required)
  • HCE 760- Research Writing in Healthcare Ethics
  • HCE 762- Organizational Healthcare Ethics
  • HCE 790- Independent Study
The Ethics Rotation Program is titled Clinical and Organizational Rotations in Ethics (CORE) and involves these four rotations.  These courses are electives and count as regular courses towards the degree.

  • HCE-746 Junior Clinical Rotation I  (CORE I)
  • HCE-747 Junior Clinical Rotation II  (CORE II)
  • HCE-781 Senior Clinical Internship I  (CORE III)
  • HCE-782 Senior Clinical Internship II  (CORE IV)

The program provides you 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 healthcare. 

The curriculum focuses on integrating clinical, organizational and professional ethics across the healthcare organization. The program also seeks to provide you with a mentored apprenticeship to undertake clinical ethics consultations, including the pre-consultation phase.

The junior rotations (HCE 746, HCE 747) are intensely supervised and occur at UPMC Mercy Hospital, which is adjacent to Duquesne University.

The senior rotation internships (HCE 781, HCE 782), in which students function as an ethicist-in-residence, occur at UPMC Mercy Hospital or at another healthcare institution. Our Center has multiple partnerships with local, regional, and national health care providers to facilitate these internships. Internship duties include professional ethics education for facility personnel, ethics research, policy review or development on ethical issues and prospective and retrospective case consultation. Each 3-credit internship requires approximately 70 hours of work within the assigned facility.

The CORE program adopts an integrated ethics approach, as developed by the Veterans Health Administration, to implement the Core Competencies for Clinical Ethics Consultation (recently revised by the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities). 

Application Requirements

Submit the university application through the graduate application portal including a resume or curriculum vitae. 

If you are in the process of completing a degree, you may submit an up-to-date unofficial transcript with your application, followed by a final, official transcript upon enrollment as a Duquesne University graduate student. All other transcripts should be either emailed or mailed from the institution.  If mailing, use the following address:

Duquesne University
McAnulty Graduate School of Liberal Arts
600 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15282

If your undergraduate and/or graduate degrees are from an institution located outside of the United States, you must use a transcript credential evaluation service to obtain a course-by-course report. The official reports must be sent directly to Duquesne University from the organization you order through and will qualify as official transcripts.

At least three confidential letters of recommendation must be submitted by those in a position to assess the applicant's past performance and future academic potential. Please use the graduate application portal to generate online requests for confidential letters of recommendation. Recommenders will receive instructions by email for uploading their letters directly to the Duquesne system.

Describe in a few paragraphs why you are a good candidate for the program to which you are applying.

For the writing sample, the admission committee expects a text, written by the applicant, that shows that he or she is able to develop and present a coherent academic argument with good literature integration. Manuscripts written by more than one author are not acceptable. There is no page requirement for the writing sample, but a good sample will normally be at least five pages in order to give the admission committee the opportunity to assess the applicant's research and writing skills. The writing sample need not be new. Ideally, the writing sample is in the area of healthcare ethics or bioethics, but that is not necessary.

Upload a recent version of your CV.

This applies only to international students. Scores should be sent electronically through the application portal.