Course Description
HSA3551 is Ethics in Health Care. The Statewide Course Numbering System describes it as a course that "will explore ethical behavior in various health care settings. Students will analyze decision making models, theories, values, and professional obligations and apply them to their roles as health care providers."
⚠⚠ Only one Florida public institution carries this number: the University of West Florida, which titles it "Health Ethics and Professionalism" at 3 credits. Two private institutions also carry it. This repository documents Florida public-institution offerings, so this guide is written for the single public carrier and hedges accordingly — where it describes content, it describes what the statewide definition requires and what a health-ethics course at this level standardly covers, not what any particular section will emphasise.
⚠ UWF's title adds a word the statewide title does not have, and it is doing real work: PROFESSIONALISM. Ethics and professionalism overlap but are not the same. Ethics is about what is right when principles conflict — when a patient's autonomy collides with their welfare, when a resource cannot be given to everyone who needs it. Professionalism is about conduct: boundaries, confidentiality discipline, reliability, appearance, communication, scope of practice, and how you behave when you are tired and nobody is watching. ⚠ Students underestimate the second and it is what most often ends careers — not a failed philosophical argument but a boundary crossing, a social-media post, or a record accessed without a reason.
⚠⚠ The statewide prerequisite is worth reading closely: "Admission to the IHHS BAS program or permission of the dean." That is a specific institution's programme named inside a statewide field — evidence that the entry was contributed by one institution and that the number sits inside a Bachelor of Applied Science pathway in health and human services. Do not read it as a statewide requirement; read your own catalog. But it does tell you what kind of course this is: a professional course inside a degree programme, taken by people who are already or will shortly be working in health care.
Learning Outcomes
Required Outcomes
- Explain the major ethical theories as they are used in health care — consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, and the ethics of care — and their characteristic strengths and failures.
- ⚠ Apply the four principles framework — autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice — and explain what to do when they conflict, which is the whole difficulty.
- Use a structured ethical decision-making model to work through a case and defend a conclusion.
- Distinguish ethics, law, policy and personal morality, and identify which is at stake in a given situation.
- ⚠⚠ Apply informed consent properly: disclosure, capacity, voluntariness, and the difference between a signed form and an informed patient.
- Assess decision-making capacity in outline, and identify the correct surrogate decision maker.
- ⚠ Apply confidentiality and HIPAA in practice — what may be disclosed, to whom, and the permitted exceptions.
- Identify mandatory reporting obligations and reconcile them with confidentiality.
- Analyse end-of-life issues: advance directives, surrogates, withholding and withdrawing treatment, futility, palliative care, and the doctrine of double effect.
- Analyse resource allocation and justice — triage, scarcity, access, and the ethics of who goes without.
- ⚠ Identify professional boundaries and boundary violations, including dual relationships and social media.
- Explain scope of practice and the ethical obligation not to exceed it.
- ⚠⚠ Explain cultural humility and analyse health disparities as an ethical matter rather than only a statistical one.
- Explain the obligations around error, disclosure and apology, and the ethics of speaking up about a colleague's practice.
- Identify the institutional structures that handle ethical questions: ethics committees, consults, compliance, IRBs.
- Apply the relevant professional code of ethics to your own intended role.
Optional Outcomes
- Analyse research ethics — informed consent in research, IRB review, vulnerable populations, and the historical abuses that produced the rules.
- Analyse reproductive and genetic ethics.
- Analyse organ donation and transplantation allocation.
- Analyse mental health and behavioural health ethics, including involuntary treatment.
- Analyse organisational and business ethics in health care — billing, marketing, referrals, conflicts of interest, fraud and abuse.
- Analyse public health ethics — mandates, quarantine, the individual against the population.
- Analyse the ethics of health information technology and AI in clinical decisions.
- Participate in a mock ethics committee or structured case deliberation.
Major Topics
Required Topics
- Foundations — theories, the four principles, and the structure of a moral argument.
- Decision-making models — how to move from a felt discomfort to a defensible position.
- Autonomy and consent — capacity, surrogates, refusal of treatment, the informed-consent process.
- Confidentiality and privacy — HIPAA, the permitted disclosures, ⚠ and the ordinary daily failures: hallway conversations, screens left open, records accessed out of curiosity.
- Truth-telling — disclosure of diagnosis and prognosis, therapeutic privilege, family requests to withhold.
- End of life — advance directives, Florida's surrogate and proxy framework, DNR orders, withdrawal of treatment, futility disputes, hospice.
- Justice and allocation — access, insurance, triage protocols, the uninsured, and rationing that is real whether or not it is named.
- ⚠ Professionalism and boundaries — dual relationships, gifts, social media, impaired colleagues, and self-care as a professional obligation.
- Scope of practice and competence — knowing the limit and declining to exceed it.
- Cultural humility and disparities — the ethics of unequal outcomes, interpreters, religious and cultural requests, implicit bias.
- Error, harm and disclosure — the duty to tell, the apology, incident reporting, and just-culture approaches.
- ⚠ Moral distress — the experience of knowing the right action and being unable to take it; ⚠⚠ a major contributor to burnout and turnover in health care, and one of the most useful things this course can name for a student before they meet it.
- Institutional and legal context — ethics committees, consults, compliance, accreditation, and the relevant Florida statutes and licensing boards.
- Case analysis — the central working method of the course.
Optional Topics
- Research ethics and the history behind the rules.
- Reproductive and genetic ethics.
- Transplantation and organ allocation.
- Behavioural health ethics and involuntary treatment.
- Health-care business ethics, fraud and abuse, and conflicts of interest.
- Public health ethics.
- Technology, data and AI ethics in clinical care.
- Global health ethics.
Resources & Tools
- Principles of Biomedical Ethics by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress — ⚠ the book that established the four-principles framework the whole field uses. Dense; a course may assign extracts.
- Health Care Ethics: Critical Issues for the 21st Century (Morrison and Furlong) and Ethics and Professionalism for Health Care Professionals — the more practical texts, and a better fit for a course that names professionalism.
- Clinical Ethics: A Practical Approach to Ethical Decisions in Clinical Medicine (Jonsen, Siegler and Winslade) — ⚠ the "four boxes" method, and the most immediately usable case-analysis tool in the field.
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot — frequently assigned, and the most accessible entry into research ethics, consent and race in medicine.
- ⚠⚠ Free and authoritative:
- The Hastings Center and the AMA Journal of Ethics — both free, both case-based, both written for practitioners.
- The AMA Code of Medical Ethics, the ANA Code of Ethics for Nurses, and the codes of the specific professional bodies (AHIMA, ACHE, APTA, AOTA) — ⚠ read the one for your own intended role; it is short and it is the standard you will actually be held to.
- The Belmont Report — three pages, free, and the foundation of US research ethics.
- HHS HIPAA guidance for the confidentiality material, and HHS Office for Human Research Protections for research ethics.
- ⚠⚠ Florida-specific and directly relevant: Chapter 765, Florida Statutes (advance directives, health-care surrogates and proxies — ⚠ Florida's surrogate framework and its specific requirements for withholding life-prolonging procedures are examinable content and practically important); Chapter 456 (health-professions regulation) and the Florida Department of Health's licensing boards, which publish their own disciplinary standards; Chapter 39 and Chapter 415 mandatory reporting, with the Florida Abuse Hotline, 1-800-96-ABUSE; and the Baker Act (Chapter 394) for involuntary mental-health examination. ⚠ The Terri Schiavo case is Florida's own, and is the single most consequential end-of-life case in American law — it is regularly taught here for that reason.
- ⚠ Your own employer's or placement's ethics consult service. Most Florida hospital systems have one, students are rarely told, and knowing it exists is the practical outcome of this course.
Career Pathways
- ⚠ This course is not a career in itself — it is a requirement inside health-professions and health-administration degrees, and the reason it is required is that every one of these roles makes ethical decisions routinely.
- Medical and Health Services Manager (SOC 11-9111) — the direct destination for a health-administration or BAS pathway, and ⚠ a manager's ethical decisions are allocation and compliance decisions affecting many patients at once.
- Registered Nurse (SOC 29-1141) and the clinical professions — Respiratory Therapist (29-1126), Radiologic Technologist (29-2034), Clinical Laboratory Technologist (29-2011), Physical and Occupational Therapy roles.
- Health Information Manager and Medical Records Specialist (SOC 29-2072) — ⚠ confidentiality and record integrity are the core of the job.
- Social and Human Service Assistant (SOC 21-1093), Community Health Worker (SOC 21-1094), Health Education Specialist (SOC 21-1091).
- Compliance Officer (SOC 13-1041) — ⚠⚠ a substantial and under-advertised destination. Health-care compliance is a real career with its own credential (Certified in Healthcare Compliance), and this course is its conceptual foundation.
- Clinical ethics and ethics-committee work — generally a graduate specialisation, but ⚠ hospital ethics committees include non-clinical and community members, and participation is a realistic route in.
- Graduate routes where this course is a prerequisite or a strong signal: MHA, MPH, nursing, PA, medicine, and health law.
- Florida employers: AdventHealth, Orlando Health, BayCare, Baptist Health, Tampa General, Memorial Healthcare, Broward Health, Lee Health, Ascension Sacred Heart and Baptist Health Care (Pensacola, in UWF's own market); the Department of Health and its 67 county health departments; the Agency for Health Care Administration; the VA health systems; and ⚠ Florida's very large long-term-care and assisted-living sector, where capacity, surrogate decision making and elder-abuse reporting arise constantly.
Special Information
Offering Notes — offerings and hours, school by school
| Institution | Its title | Credits | Contact hours |
|---|
| University of West Florida | Health Ethics and Professionalism | 3 | not published |
⚠⚠ One public carrier, and that is the honest figure. The statewide record also shows two private institutions carrying the number at 3 credits under the title "Ethics in Healthcare." This repository documents Florida public-institution offerings, so they are not listed above — but their existence is worth knowing for one reason: they agree with the statewide title, and UWF does not.
⚠ So the single public carrier is also the one whose title diverges — adding professionalism to ethics. That is an addition rather than a substitution, and it is a defensible one: a course inside a professional degree has to cover conduct as well as principle. But it means the course is broader than the statewide description and that some of its hours go to boundaries, communication and scope of practice rather than to ethical theory.
A student should expect, and should confirm:
| The ethics half | The professionalism half |
|---|
| theories and principles, consent and capacity, end-of-life, allocation and justice, case analysis and written argument | boundaries and dual relationships, confidentiality in daily practice, social media, scope of practice, impaired colleagues, communication, self-care and moral distress |
⚠⚠ Hedging, stated plainly: with one public carrier there is no second catalog to check a claim against, so this guide describes what the statewide definition requires and what health-ethics courses at this level standardly cover. Your syllabus is the authority on emphasis, on which cases are used, and on whether a formal decision-making model is assessed.
⚠ The 45 contact hours at the top of this guide are derived — the Florida convention for a 3-credit lecture course. No institution publishes an hour figure. ⚠ The course is frequently offered online or in an accelerated term within BAS programmes serving working students, in which case the scheduled hours describe the commitment poorly and the reading and writing load is front-loaded.
⚠⚠ Read the statewide prerequisite carefully — it names one institution's programme
The statewide record gives the prerequisite as "admission to the IHHS BAS program or permission of the dean." ⚠ That is a local programme name sitting in a statewide field — the SCNS records are institution-contributed, and a specific programme's admission requirement has ended up recorded as though it were general.
Two consequences:
- ⚠ Do not treat it as a statewide gate. Check your own institution's catalog for what actually applies.
- ⚠ But do read the signal. It tells you this number lives inside a Bachelor of Applied Science pathway — a degree designed for students who hold an associate degree and often work in the field. That shapes the course: the cases are workplace cases, the classmates have clinical experience, and the discussion assumes familiarity with how a health-care setting actually runs. ⚠ A student arriving without that background should say so early rather than quietly; the experienced classmates are the course's best resource.
⚠⚠ PREFIX divergence: health ethics has several Florida homes
| Prefix | Typical framing |
|---|
HSA | health services administration — the management and systems perspective (this number) |
HSC | general health science — often the pre-professional version |
PHI | philosophy — ⚠ a genuinely different course: more theory, more argument, less workplace application, and frequently carrying a Gordon Rule writing designation |
NUR | nursing ethics, tied to the ANA code and to nursing practice |
PHC | public health — population-level ethics |
⚠ The `PHI` version is the one most likely to be mistaken for this course and least likely to substitute for it in a professional degree audit — and conversely, a philosophy programme may not accept `HSA3551` for a philosophy requirement. Where a programme names a prefix, read it literally.
Position in the curriculum, workload, and the failure mode
A 3000-level course inside a professional sequence. ⚠ It sits best before or alongside clinical or internship placement, because that is when the situations become real.
Budget six to nine hours a week. The reading is moderate; ⚠ the writing is where the work is, and case analyses are graded on reasoning rather than on conclusion.
⚠⚠ The characteristic weak submission states a position and asserts it. The course is asking for something harder: identify the principles in conflict, state the strongest version of the opposing case, say which consideration outweighs which and why, and name what would change your answer. A well-reasoned conclusion an instructor disagrees with scores better than a popular conclusion with no argument under it — and that is also how a real ethics consultation works.
⚠⚠ A note on the content, because some of it is heavy
This course deals with death, suffering, abuse, coercion, and the documented historical mistreatment of patients — including the research abuses that produced modern consent rules. ⚠ Some students in a health-professions course have personal experience of these situations, sometimes recent.
Two things are worth saying. A good instructor gives notice before difficult material and does not require personal disclosure; you are never obliged to offer your own history as a case study. And ⚠⚠ if the material is distressing, that is a reason to use support rather than to disengage — every Florida public institution has free counselling for enrolled students, and the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available to anyone, at any hour, by call or text. ⚠ Learning to notice your own distress and act on it is not separate from this course's content — it is the self-care obligation that the professionalism half is about.
AI Integration
⚠⚠ Health care is adopting these tools quickly, and this course is where the resulting questions belong. Two distinct things are worth separating: using AI to study ethics, and the ethics of using AI on patients.
Useful for studying: explaining a theory or a principle a second way; generating practice cases and counter-arguments to test your reasoning; explaining what a statute or a code provision says so you can find it; summarising a long reading; structuring a case analysis; and drafting prose in revision.
⚠⚠ Where it fails as a study tool:
- ⚠⚠⚠ Never put identifiable patient information into an AI tool. HIPAA protects it, and a real patient's details typed into a chat interface is a disclosure whether or not anyone notices. ⚠ This is the most likely way a student or new employee in health care gets into serious trouble with these tools, and it applies to a reflective assignment about a workplace situation as much as to a question about what to do. De-identify properly — not just by removing the name.
- ⚠⚠ It will not take a hard position. Models hedge toward balance, and much of ethics is deciding when balance is the wrong answer. A generated case analysis surveys considerations and declines to weigh them — which is precisely the failure mode the course grades against.
- ⚠ It gets the law wrong where it is state-specific. Florida's surrogate and advance-directive framework (Chapter 765), the Baker Act, and the mandatory-reporting duties are statutory and local. A paraphrase is not a source.
- It invents citations — cases, code provisions, statute sections, studies.
- ⚠ It presents contested questions as settled, in whichever direction the corpus leans — and a course whose subject is genuine moral disagreement is poorly served by that.
⚠⚠ And the subject-matter half, which belongs in this course more than in most: AI is now in clinical use — triage and risk scoring, imaging support, documentation, prior-authorisation decisions, chatbot triage. The ethical questions are live and this is the course that owns them:
- ⚠⚠ Bias and justice. A model trained on historical care patterns learns historical inequities — and ⚠ the course's own disparities material is the framework for seeing why. A tool that allocates attention or resources can reproduce disparity at scale and with an appearance of objectivity.
- Consent and transparency — does a patient know a model was involved, and does that matter?
- Accountability — when an algorithmic recommendation contributes to harm, who is responsible? ⚠ The professional standard is unambiguous: the licensed human makes the decision and answers for it.
- Privacy — training data, third-party processors, and the secondary use of records.
- Access — whether these tools narrow or widen gaps in who receives good care.
⚠ The framing worth carrying into practice: a licensed professional's responsibility is personal and non-delegable, and the codes say so. No tool shares it, and "the system recommended it" is not a defence to a licensing board. Use these tools to learn faster; make the judgement yourself, and be able to say why.
Academic integrity: read your syllabus, and expect a health-professions programme's policy to be strict — ⚠ the coursework is preparation for a licensed role, and programmes reasonably treat integrity here as a professionalism matter rather than only an academic one.