Center for Moral Values in Health and Medicine

The Krug lecture is an endowed speaker series at OUWB organized by the Biomedical Ethics Student Organization, which brings in nationally recognized speakers. The annual lecture is open to a broad set of community members and continuing education (CME) credits are available for physicians.

Drs. Jason Wasserman, Mark Navin, and Abram Brummett regularly present and coordinate speakers for sessions on clinical bioethics for staff across the Corewell Health system. These sessions provide CME credits for staff. Recent and forthcoming topics include Islamic clinical bioethics, religiously-motivated refusals in pediatrics, decision-making capacity, and retrospective reviews of ethics cases that occurred within the Corewell Health system.

This is a collaborative effort between the medical school and the Department of Counseling in the School of Education and Health Sciences. We use the endowed gift from the Faircloth family to host an annual dinner and lecture focusing on humanism in medicine. At this event, we also showcase the annual departmental awards for the counseling students and conduct the Gold Humanism Honor Society induction.

This new initiative builds on our existing commitment to Holocaust education at OU and OUWB. The centerpiece of the effort is a mentored excursion to Auschwitz-Birkenau where a group of students explore the history of medicine’s complicity in the Holocaust as well as the resistance of Jewish physicians in the ghettos and extermination camps. Students reflect on how this history can inform understandings of our moral commitments in medicine today and foster a deeper sense of professional identity. The study trip occurs during the summer and is made possible by the Bella Rozencweig Hirsch Endowment for Biomedical Ethics, as well as numerous gifts from other donors. Upon their return, and in collaboration with the Cis Maisel Center at OU and the Holocaust Memorial Center in Southfield, Michigan, students develop and deliver education programs about medicine and the Holocaust to OUWB and various schools and community organizations throughout Metro Detroit.

The MHCB curriculum includes 6 required courses across the M1, M2, and M3 years. This represents more contact hours in ethics and humanities than any medical school in the country. Generally speaking, the trajectory of these courses proceeds from foundational topics (M1), to deeper inquiry on special topics and populations (M2), to a more detailed exploration of clinical ethics topics (M3). Additionally, there is a parallel pedagogical trajectory, which finds courses yielding increasing responsibilities for learning (and even teaching) to the students themselves across these years.

This freely available online course developed by Drs. Jason Wasserman and Stephen Loftus is a collaboration between OUWB and the Arnold P. Gold Foundation. The course is available on the NextGenU.org platform and is openly accessible to students worldwide. It has currently been used by nearly 700 students in 39 countries, including 74 medical schools and 140 universities in the United States. A live, synchronous version of the course has been co-taught by Drs. Hedy Wald and Jason Wasserman and delivered to students within the United States, as well as Ireland, Singapore, Canada, and Oman.

The Oakland University Philosophy Department offers an undergraduate minor in Bioethics. This minor draws on the traditions of clinical bioethics and medical humanities to prepare students interested in health professions to address ethically pressing issues in their careers. The Philosophy Department has structured the minor so it fits seamlessly into the curricula of programs across the university, including Nursing, Health Sciences, and many programs in the College of Arts and Sciences (especially Biomedical Sciences).