Health Ethics Education for Health Administration Chaplains

Abstract

It is imperative for divinity and health administration programs to improve their level of ethics education for their graduates who work as health administration chaplains. With an initial presentation of the variation of ethical dilemmas presented in health care facilities covering social, organizational, and patient levels, we indicate the need for a study to determine current levels of ethics education in divinity and health administration programs. Our analysis focused on the degree of ethics education in divinity and health administration programs with a hypothesis that the two programs would provide a similar degree of ethics education. Since we found our hypothesis to be invalid based on statistically significant differences in ethics education (p < 0.0005) among accredited divinity and health administration programs (μ = 1.2109 and μ = 0.6411 courses respectively), we present an ethics education sequence of courses that would more fully prepare chaplains for the ethical dilemmas in health care facilities. While a baseline of three ethics courses would initially prepare chaplains for ethical decision making in health care, an ideal sequence is six ethics courses at the graduate level, including our EXCEL program that we present here. The EXCEL program would cover the full range of potential ethical dilemmas in the domains of decision ethics, professional ethics, clinical ethics, business ethics, organizational ethics, and social ethics (Porter, 2004). We also present future research that would improve the relationship between ethics decision making and quality of care outcomes in health care facilities.