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PhD in Healthcare Ethics

USA

5

1

What will I learn?

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.

Students in HCE MA Degree track who continue on in the Doctoral Degree programs must complete 6 additional courses after their 10 MA courses, so that 16 courses (48 credits) have been completed before they apply for the comprehensive examination.

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 on integrating clinical, organizational, and professional ethics across the healthcare 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. The senior rotation internships (HCE 681, 682), in which students function as an ethicist-in-residence, occur at UPMC Mercy Hospital or at another healthcare institution. HCE 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 three-credits Internship requires approximately 150 hours of work within the assigned facility.

Typically, ethics rotations and internships may be initiated after completion of 18 credit hours of coursework. 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).

The Ph.D. degree is a research degree that combines academic and clinical education to train students in a systematic and critical manner to be scholars in the field. Hence, the Ph.D. dissertation focuses on appropriate research and writing competencies to be successful scholars in the field.

Which department am I in?

McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts

Study options

Full Time (3 years)

Tuition fees
US$24,534.00 per year
Start date

September 2025

Venue

McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts

College Hall, 600 Forbes Avenue,

PITTSBURGH,

Pennsylvania,

15282, United States

Online/Distance (3 years)

Tuition fees
US$24,534.00 per year
The given fee for full time and it's a guide for online students
Start date

September 2025

Entry requirements

For international students

Students with a Bachelor's degree in a field related to health care ethics, such as a humanities degree with a major or minor in ethics, are eligible to apply for admission to a doctoral program.

We require a TOEFL score of 80 and also IELTS score of 6.5.

*There may be different IELTS requirements depending on your chosen course.

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