Upcoming Courses

To see a list of past courses offered, click here

All Courses, unless otherwise noted, are held at the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy, 3401 Market Street, 3rd Floor.

Fall 2012

BIOE 551 - Bioethics and Digital Media
Instructor: Lance Wahlert
Time: Time: Tuesdays, 4:30-7:00, September 11-December 4, 2012. Room 321
How have advancements in media technology shaped, changed, corrected, or exacerbated ethical dilemmas in clinical encounters?

Focusing first on the history of 20th-century advancements in analog and digital media (film, radio, television, telephone, etc.), this course will consider the ways that technological innovations in media enhance and complicate medical encounters and bioethics. Turning to more recent forms of digital media (the internet, the iPhone, Skype, YouTube, fileshare, etc.), we will consider whether a diversified palette of digital media in the 21st century resolves or problematizes the ethics of medicine.

Topics to be covered in this class include: interactive social media and virtual health communities; blogging and its effects on patient narrative and health care activism; diagnostic resources online and challenges to clinical encounters; digitization of hospital records and the revision of HIPA standards; and televised surgical encounters and the ethics of clinical entertainment.

In this course, students will study various forms of digital media, provide critical analysis on the efficacy of these media, and create some of their own.

BIOE 555 001 - Neuroethics
Instructors: Jonathan Moreno
Time: Mondays, 4:30-7:00, September 10-December 3, 2012. Classroom 331.
As Martha Farah has observed, “The brain is hot.” Neuroethics might well be the most rapidly growing area within bioethics; indeed, in some respects neuroethics has grown as an independent field, with its own journals, professional society and institutional centers. This growth over the past decade is partly attributable to the growth of neuroscience itself and to the challenging philosophical and moral questions it inherently raises.

A 2012 Royal Society report, observes that “(a)n increasingly mechanistic understanding of the brain raises a host of ethical, legal, and social implications. This has laid the foundation for the emergent field of Neuroethics, which examines ethical issues governing the conceptual and practical developments of neuroscience. Irrespective of their validity, even the claims that modern neuroscience entails the re-examination of complex and sensitive topics like free will, consciousness, identity, and responsibility raises significant ethical issues. As such, neuroethics asks questions that extend beyond the usual umbrella of biomedical ethics.”

Our course will, therefore, consider the new knowledge and ways of learning about the brain from scientific and ethico-legal and social standpoints. We will examine the core themes of neuroethics, including cognitive enhancement, the nature of the self and personhood, neuroimaging and privacy, and the ways that all these themes are brought together in matters affecting national security.

BIOE 565 001 - Rationing and Resource Allocation
Instructors: Ezekiel Emanuel and Harald Schmidt
Time: Wednesdays, 5:00-7:30, September 5-December 5, 2012. Location College Hall 200
You have one liver but three patients awaiting a liver transplant.  Who should get the liver?  What criteria should be used to select the recipient? Is it fair to give it to an alcoholic?  These are some of the questions that arise in the context of rationing and allocating scarce health care resources among particular individuals, and concern what are called micro-allocation decisions.  But trade-offs also need to be made at the meso- and macro-level.  Budgets of public payers of healthcare, such as governments, and of private ones, such as health plans, are limited: they cannot cover all drugs and services that appear beneficial to patients or physicians.  So what services should they provide? Is there a core set of benefits that everyone should be entitled to? If so, by what process should we determine these? How can we make fair decisions, if we know from the outset than not all needs can be met? Using the cases of organs for transplantation, the rationing for vaccines in a flu pandemic, and drug shortages, the course will critically examine alternative theories for allocating scarce resources among individuals.  Using both the need to establish priorities for global health aid and to define an essential benefit package for health insurance, the course will critically examine diverse theories for allocation decisions, including cost-effectiveness analysis, age-based rationing and accountability for reasonableness.

BIOE 575 401 Health Policy: Health Care Reform and the Future of the American Health System
Instructor: Ezekiel Emanuel and J. Sanford Schwartz
Time: Tuesdays AND Thursdays, 4:30-6:00, September 6 - December 6, 2012. Location: Jon M. Huntsman Hall, Room F85 (Huntsman Hall is at the corner of 38th and Locust Walk)
This course will provide students a broad overview of the current U.S. healthcare system. The course will focus on the challenges facing the health care system, an in-depth understanding of the Affordable Care Act, and its potential impact upon health care access, delivery, cost, and quality.

The U.S. health care system is the worlds largest, most technologically advanced, most expensive, with uneven quality, and an unsustainable cost structure. This multi-disciplinary course will explore the history and structure of the current American health care system and the impact of the Affordable Care Act. How did the United States get here? The course will examine the history of and problems with employment-based health insurance, the challenges surrounding access, cost and quality, and the medical malpractice conundrum. As the Affordable Care Act is implemented over the next decade, the U.S. will witness tremendous changes that will shape the American health care system for the next 50 years or more. The course will examine potential reforms, including those offered by liberals and conservatives and information that can be extracted from health care systems in other developed countries. The second half of the course will explore key facets of the Affordable Care Act, including improving access to care and health insurance exchanges, improving quality and constraining costs through health care delivery system reforms, realigning capacity through changes in workforce and medical education, and potential impact on biomedical and other innovation. The course will also examine the political context and process of passing major legislation in general and health care legislation in particular, including constitutional arguments surrounding the Affordable Care Act. Throughout lessons will integrate the disciplines of health economics, health and social policy, law and political science to elucidate key principles.

BIOE 601 001 - Introduction to Clinical Bioethics
Instructor: Autumn Fiester
Time: Tuesdays, 4:30-7:00, September 11-December 4, 2012. Room 331
This course is intended to serve as a broad introduction to the field of clinical bioethics. The course will focus on the central areas in clinical ethics: genetics, reproduction, end-of-life, informed consent, and surrogate decision-making. In this course will be focus on case analysis, bioethics concepts, relevant legal cases, and classical readings on the themes.

** ALSO OFFERED ON THURSDAYS **

BIOE 601 002 - Introduction to Clinical Bioethics
Instructor: Autumn Fiester
Time: Thursdays, 4:30-7:00, September 6-December 6, 2012, Classroom 331

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Spring 2013

BIOE 546 001/548 001 - Mediation Intensive I/III (1 CU)
Instructors: Edward Bergman, Autumn Fiester, and Lance Wahlert
Times: Friday-Monday, January 18-21st, 9-5pm daily.
This is an immersion experience of learning through role-playing mediation simulations. It has the same format of the other Mediation Intensives, but will NOT duplicate simulations. Students will:

Learn to effectively manage clinical disputes among and between caregivers, patients and surrogates through mediation
Discover how to define problems and assess underlying interests to generate mutually acceptable options
Role-play in a variety of clinical situations as both disputants and mediators
Practice mediation with professional actors
Receive constructive feedback in supportive environment

BIOE 540 001 - Challenging Clinical Ethics: Managing patient/caregiver conflict through mediation
Instructor: Edward Bergman
Time: Thursdays
In the contemporary healthcare system patients, families, institutions and a multiplicity of caregivers engage in disputes over a myriad of issues - appropriate care, authorized decision-makers, managed care, information disclosure, and behavior/personality conflicts - sometimes with life and death hanging in the balance. Such disputes are rife with legal, ethical, emotional and scientific complexity. They are frequently highly charged and are often emergent in nature. In recent years, mediation has grown exponentially as a dispute resolution mechanism of choice. Not surprisingly, the success of mediation, and a wider understanding of the process, has led to its application in the realm of healthcare disputes with encouraging results. This course will provide an overview of negotiation fundamentals critical to the practice of mediation followed by an introduction to classical mediation theory and practice. Similarities and differences between mediation in the healthcare field, as distinct from other contexts, will be examined as will special problems highlighted by various commentators in the field. All class members will participate in mediation role-plays designed to simulate disputes prevalent in the healthcare landscape.

BIOE 551 001 - Narrative Ethics / Literature and Medicine
Instructor: Lance Wahlert
Time: Mondays
Description TBA

BIOE 580 001 - Research Ethics
Instructors: Jennifer Walter & Angela Bradbury
Time: Wednesdays
This seminar is intended to give students a broad overview of research ethics and regulation. The students will come out of the class with an understanding of the historical evolution, moral bases and practical application of biomedical research ethics. The course includes reading assignments, lectures, discussions and practical review of research protocols and in-class interviews with researcher and study subjects. Course topics include history of human subjects protections, regulatory and ethical frameworks for biomedical research, informed consent theory and application, selection of fair research subjects and payment, confidentiality, secondary uses of data and stored tissue, ethics of international research, pediatric and genetic research and conflicts of interest in biomedical research.

BIOE 590 001 - Ethics in Mental Healthcare
Instructor: Dominic Sisti
Time: Wednesdays
Mental healthcare—which includes but is not limited to psychiatry, psychology, and clinical social work—is an especially ethically fraught subdiscipline of the larger medical enterprise. Issues range from garden-variety problems related to informed consent, patient capacity, and clinical professionalism to novel issues related to involuntary treatment, research on mentally ill persons, questions about free will and nosological categories. This course will present a survey of these ethical issues by first introducing foundational concepts from ethical theory and the philosophy of psychiatry and mind. Students will be expected to become conversant in several bioethical approaches and methods and be able to use them to critically examine both historical and contemporary questions in mental healthcare and research.

BIOE 590 002 -Doing Right by Eating Well: The Ethics of Food
Instructor: Anne Barnhill
Time: Tuesdays
Eating is an essential human activity: we need to eat to survive. But alas, we need not eat well to survive, and many of us don’t. This course is about eating well—eating in a way that meets our moral responsibilities towards animals, towards other people, and towards ourselves. We’ll consider such questions as: Is it morally wrong to make animals suffer and to kill them in order to eat them? Does it depend upon the animal (e.g. cows vs. clams)? What are the impacts on animals of various eating habits (e.g. meat-eating, “conscientious omnivorism,” vegetarianism, veganism)? Do we have moral obligations to adopt (or to abandon) the relevant eating habits? If a morally problematic food production practice will continue regardless of whether you purchase the food product in question, do you have any moral reason not to purchase that food product? Should we eat in ways that express and honor our humanity, our cultures, our religions, and our family traditions—or is this comparatively unimportant? Should the government try to influence our food choices, to make them healthier?

BIOE 602 001 - Conceptual Foundations of Bioethics
Instructor: Autumn Fiester
Time: Tuesdays OR Thursdays
This course examines the various theoretical approaches to bioethics and critically assesses their underpinnings. Topics to be covered include an examination of various versions of utilitarianism; deonotological theories; virtue ethics; ethics of care; the fundamental principles of bioethics (autonomy, beneficence, distributive justice, non-maleficence); casuistry; and pragmatism. The course will include the application of the more theoretical ideas to particular topics, such as informed consent, confidentiality, and end of life issues.

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Summer 2013

BIOE 552 900 - Medicine and Bioethics in the City of Brotherly Love
Instructor: Nora Jones
Time: TBD

Philadelphia is in many ways a microcosm of the history of medicine and bioethics in the United States, and continues to hold national influence (20% of all active practitioners in the United States have trained at some point in their careers here). This course will use archives, scholarly articles, fiction, and field trips to survey medicine and bioethics here in our own city of Brotherly Love.

We will look at the individuals, institutions, and cultural contexts behind many of our successful innovations, failures, and controversies, including:

• Innovation in medical and nursing care and education (The Pennsylvania Hospital, the University of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Nursing Society, Old Blockley)
• Public health advances in clean water, epidemic management, and health tracking (the Fairmount Water Works, the Lazaretto quarantine station, the Board of Health)
• Struggles for gender and racial equality (the Women’s Medical College, the integration of African American doctors in the city)
• The at times contentious relationships of anatomy, medical art, and medical museums (Eakins, the Academy of Fine Arts, the Mutter, the PMA)
• The business and challenge of medical innovation (CHOP’s conjoined twins, HUPs gene therapy trials)
• The ethics and economics of pharmaceutical development (the Delaware Valley’s ‘pharma belt’)
• Issues around access to transplant and transplant tourism (Amelia, local hospital involvement in the Rosenbaum kidney ‘cartel’

Throughout the course we will focus on the interrelationships among medicine, science, technology, economics, gender, race, and populations as key elements in understanding the cultural landscape of medicine, health care, and bioethics here in Philadelphia. We will explore how this local context can illuminate trends more nationally and globally. This class is geared for students interested in a survey of key bioethics themes and issues, the social history of medicine, and in anthropological approaches to medicine, public health, and bioethics.

Vaccine Ethics
Instructor: Jason Schwartz
Time: TBD

Interdisciplinary Perspectives in the End of Life
Instructor: Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy (team instruction)
Time: TBD