Graduate Certificate in Bioethics and Humanities in Health

BEHH 5210: The Art of Observation (In person): The Art of Observation is designed to sharpen participants’ perceptual and analytical skills, which are essential for excellence in clinical practice in dentistry, medicine, and other professional fields. The goals are to increase compassion and empathy, encourage tolerance for ambiguity and diversity, recognize biases in interpretation and foster reflection and honest communication using the arts to gain these skillsets.

BEHH 5211: The Art of Listening (In person): The Art of Listening is an innovative course that explores the profound intersection of musical and clinical listening skills to enhance practice in medicine, dentistry, and other healthcare fields. Participants will explore how musical narratives unfold, mirroring the way patient histories are constructed and understood in clinical settings. Special attention is paid to the emotional and cultural aspects of music, encouraging students to reflect on how these elements influence perception and interpretation in healthcare. This approach fosters empathy and cultural competence, crucial attributes in today's diverse healthcare landscape.

BEHH 5212: Pain & Dentistry in the History of Western Art: This interdisciplinary course explores the intersection of pain and dentistry through the lens of Western art history since 1500, examining how dental pain has been uniquely represented in artistic works while investigating broader themes of human suffering, inequality, and medical practice. Through a blend of asynchronous and synchronous learning over 8 sessions, students engage with historical and contemporary perspectives on dental medicine, considering how past representations and understandings of dental pain inform modern dental practice. The course combines reflective writing, collaborative Wiki development, and group presentations to help students develop historical fluency in dental practice and patient experience that they can apply to contemporary dental medicine.

BEHH 5310: Ethical Care in Patients Living with Dementia: This course examines the ethical considerations in caring for patients living with dementia, addressing the growing challenges of an aging population where nearly 55 million people worldwide live with the condition. Through case studies and interactive discussions, participants explore key concepts like autonomy, informed consent, and decision-making capacity. The course equips healthcare providers with the knowledge and skills to deliver compassionate, ethical care that balances patient rights and safety while honoring the dignity and individuality of those living with dementia.

BEHH 5311: Moral Distress in Healthcare: Moral distress is a growing challenge in healthcare settings, where professionals know the ethically correct course of action, but face barriers in implementation due to institution, role-based, or legal constraints. Through case studies and group discussions, participants will explore the causes of moral distress - including conflicts between personal values, institutional policies, patient wishes, and resource limitations - while developing strategies to recognize and address these issues in themselves and colleagues. The course aims to foster resilience and ethical decision-making skills while promoting a supportive culture that prioritizes moral well-being in healthcare settings.

BEHH 5350: Narrative Principles and Practices in Healthcare: This 1-credit course introduces students to the intellectual and clinical discipline of narrative work in healthcare through both theoretical foundations and practical applications. Through structured workshops and in-person instruction, students develop skills in close reading of texts and writing, learning how to apply narrative principles to healthcare settings. The course aims to help healthcare professionals better understand and work with the stories and narratives that are fundamental to medical practice. 

BEHH 6655: Public Health Ethics (Synchronous Online): This course offers an introduction to public health ethics, covering fundamental concepts and the ethical challenges arising from public health's core functions, while also providing practical tools and diverse case studies to help learners analyze and resolve ethical dilemmas in public health practice and policy.

BEHH #: Reflecting Writing and Practice (Synchronous Online): Reflective writing is an essential component of narrative medicine, the practice of using storytelling, close reading and listening to understand a patient's experience and provide empathetic, whole-centered care. This 1-credit course allows health care professionals to study some of the tenets of narrative medicine and turn an idea into a story.

BEHH #: Medical Improv (In Person): This course will introduce students to medical improv--a training technique that uses improvisational theater exercises to help healthcare professionals develop better communication skills, empathy, and adaptability when interacting with patients and colleagues.

BEHH #: Clinical Ethics Case Consultation (Synchronous Online): This course will introduce students to the work of case consultation via practicing working through clinical cases. It will require reading, writing, and group discussion.

BEHH 5410: Research Methods in the Health Humanities (Asynchronous Online): This immersive course explores the intersections of humanities and healthcare through methodological inquiry, focusing on three core methodologies: narrative methods, visual and material methods, and ethnographic methods. Its central goal is to foster a deeper understanding of how humanities-based research methods can illuminate the complex experiences of health, illness, and healing in contemporary society.

BEHH #: Behind the Data: Methods for Ethical and Equitable Human Research (Synchronous Online): This course will focus on selected topics in the practical and ethical dimensions of conducting meaningful and actionable empirical research in human health. Students will learn to develop more robust surveys, use mixed methods to incorporate storytelling, and learn about the importance of community connection. They will be exposed to methods designed to address policy issues, and will develop a clear understanding of why it matters how we recruit and who makes it into our studies.

BEHH #: Art, Advocacy & Healthcare (In Person): The course will explore the intersection of arts, advocacy and research to create a health care experience that is equitable, safe, and compassionate for all.

BEHH 5450: Addressing Health Stigma in Social Contexts (Synchronous Online): This interdisciplinary course examines health stigma in social contexts, providing students with tools to understand why health stigma is prevalent and how it can be addressed. Through in-person seminars, students learn to analyze health stigma and develop explanations for its persistence while exploring potential interventions and solutions.

PUBH 6655/BEHH 5655: Public Health Ethics (Online Synchronous): This course offers an introduction to public health ethics, covering fundamental concepts and the ethical challenges arising from public health's core functions, while also providing practical tools and diverse case studies to help learners analyze and resolve ethical dilemmas in public health practice and policy.

BEHH 5213: Reflections on Incarceration & Well Being (hybrid): This discussion-based course examines incarceration as a structural determinant of health, exploring how the carceral system impacts individual, community, and societal well-being through engagement with writings from incarcerated and previously incarcerated authors, critical theories, and empirical texts.

Over 16 weeks, students delve into crucial topics including healthcare delivery, conditions of confinement, mortality data collection, and specific challenges faced by diverse populations like pregnant individuals, aging incarcerated individuals, and those with disabilities.

Through weekly discussions, reflections, and a final policy letter, students develop a deep understanding of how mass incarceration intersects with public health while centering the lived experiences of individuals with lived experience.

BEHH #: Digital Storytelling for Professional Identity & Moral Resilience in Healthcare (Synchronous and Asynchronous Online, with In Person Option): This course explores digital storytelling as a reflective and creative practice for healthcare professionals and trainees experiencing burnout, moral injury, or disconnection from their core professional values. Through the lens of bioethics and the health humanities, students will craft and share digital stories that engage with their lived experiences. This work will reconnect them to meaning, foster narrative competence, and moral resilience.

BEHH #: Ethics of Research in Health Sciences (Synchronous Online w/In Person Option): This class explores some of the most contentious ethical issues confronted by researchers in the health sciences. It addresses the NIH requirement for Responsible Conduct of Research training, for those doing human subjects research, but it has a particular focus on issues facing those doing basic science, health services, big data, and other research work outside of human subject research.

ANTH 5063: Ethnographic Methods: Principles, Ethics, and Critiques (In Person, CU Denver): This course introduces students to ethnographic methodology—considered the best method for capturing group perspectives, subjective meanings, and collective behavior patterns—while examining its principles, ethics, politics, and critiques.  

ANTH 5650: Disability Anthropology (In person, CU Denver): This course explores how communities understand disability across different contexts of inequality, war, and politics, using diverse materials from anthropology and disability studies to examine disability as a form of human diversity through time and space. 

BEHH 5010: Foundations of Bioethics & Humanities in Health (required for certificate): This course combines two essential areas of study: The first eight weeks focus on the foundations of bioethics, examining moral frameworks used in medical and health settings and their application to clinical, organizational, and population-based cases. The second eight weeks explore the foundations of narrative practice in medicine through engagement with various texts and other materials. Each section maintains its distinct focus while providing students with complementary perspectives on health and health care. 

BEHH 5215: Culture and Health (asynchronous, with in-person/synchronous meeting options): This course bridges diverse scholarly perspectives to investigate the social and cultural practices that contribute to health and disease around the world. Through interdisciplinary approaches, we examine how universal human phenomena are experienced differently in diverse contexts, exploring the complex interplay between biological, socioeconomic, historical, spatial, and cultural factors in shaping health experiences.  

BEHH 5750: Pain, Its Paradoxes & the Human Condition: This interdisciplinary graduate course explores pain as a universal yet deeply personal aspect of the human condition, examining its paradoxes and complexities through diverse lenses including history, philosophy, literature, public health, and medicine. Through a blended learning format combining synchronous and asynchronous sessions, students engage with seven problem-based learning modules to investigate topics ranging from the culture of pain to its inequitable distribution across social strata, while developing critical understanding of pain's relationship to suffering, stigma, and social justice.

BEHH 5850: Clinical Ethics: This graduate-level clinical ethics course introduces students to key theories, methods, history, and practical applications of medical ethics through monthly discussions and hands-on learning activities. Through a combination of readings, case analyses, independent projects, in class discussions, and discussion boards, students explore critical topics such as informed consent, confidentiality, end-of-life care, reproductive ethics, and treatment decision making, while developing practical skills in ethical reasoning and consultation. The course emphasizes active participation and real-world application, with students completing case analyses and an independent research project that allows them to deeply explore an area of clinical ethics that aligns with their interests.

ANTH 5063: Ethnographic Methods: Principles, Ethics & Critiques (In Person, CU Denver): Ethnography is considered the best method to capture the perspectives of various groups, subjective meanings attached to behaviors and identities, and the reasons for patters of collective behavior. This course will introduce students to the principles of ethnography and will consider the ethics, politics, and critiques of the methodology.

ANTH 5650: Disability Anthropology (In Person, CU Denver): This course explores how communities recognize and make sense of disability globally and locally, examining its relationship to racial, gender, and class inequalities in contexts of war, colonialism, and capitalism, while investigating who claims disability and through what politics. Drawing from anthropology, disability studies, and broader social sciences, the course uses ethnography, novels, films, podcasts, and social media to develop a holistic understanding of disability as a form of human diversity across time and space.

ANTH 5090: Psychedelic Anthropology (In Person and Synchronous Online, CU Denver): Psychotropic drugs, both legal and illicit, are a predominant part of our everyday lives. This course examines their use and meaning within cultures of health and wellness, and the plant medicine, spiritual, social, political and economic issues that surround their production, use and misuse. Course activities focus on ethnographic research strategies and arts-based approaches to public scholarship.

ANTH 5600: Medical Anthropology (In Person, CU Denver): Introduces students to the theories and concepts of medical anthropology, the study of human health and illness. Explores conceptions of the body, modalities of healing, the clinical encounter, and new medical technologies.

ANTH 5230: Fieldwork Methods (In Person, CU Denver): This experiential course explores anthropological critiques, decolonizing approaches, and multi-media strategies to fieldwork methods with a focus on oral histories, visual narratives, community based participatory research, and indigenous ways of knowledge creation. At the end of the course, the student should have the cultural understanding and the methodological skills to complete a team-based fieldwork project successfully.

ANTH 5300: Immigrant Health (In Person, CU Denver): This course examines health issues associated with transnational migration from an anthropological point of view. It provides students the opportunity to engage in hands-on fieldwork projects designed in conjunction with local immigrant and refugee-serving agencies.

ANTH 5660: The Anthropology of Bioethics (In Person, CU Denver): This upper-level seminar approaches bioethics through the lens of cultural anthropology. It does so by exploring how communities around the globe grapple with the moral dilemmas generated by new medical technologies, scientific innovation, environmental degradation, and structural violence. Challenging conventional distinctions between biomedicine and culture, secularism and religion, or philosophy and political economy, readings and films situate the ethical predicaments of health and illness in broader historical and sociopolitical contexts. Utilizing discussion, collaboration, and reflexive writing assignments, this course examines whose voices, expertise, and concerns get recognized in bioethical debates, ultimately connecting bioethics to broader questions of representation and justice. After a general introduction to the anthropology of ethics and bioethics, specific topics covered may include organ donation, cancer treatment, experimentation and research, reproductive technologies, state violence, climate change, and extinction.

We understand the demands of professional life. Our program is designed to meet your professional needs and goals:

Flexible options: Choose from course formats including asynchronous options and varying credit loads (1-3 credits).

Flexible timing: Take one course or complete the full certificate and complete it at your own pace.

Collaborative Environment: Learn alongside colleagues from diverse health professions and apply concepts directly to your current work.

Financial Value: $558 per credit hour (Colorado residents) with tuition assistance available for University of Colorado System employees through the TAB program.

Career Advancement: Earn up to 12.0 credit hours to apply toward a Master’s degree in health humanities or other graduate programs at CU Denver.

This program welcomes professionals from diverse backgrounds in health-related fields, including:

• Clinicians and healthcare professionals
• Clinical Ethics Ambassadors
• Researchers and laboratory professionals
• Healthcare administrators, policy makers, and legal professionals
• Educators and program directors
• Public health professionals
• Social workers and mental health professionals
• Students preparing for or already enrolled in health professional graduate programs
• Health communication specialists
• Community health workers and advocates

Through the generous support of the School of Dental Medicine at CU Anschutz, most students, faculty, and staff are eligible to enroll and take classes in the BEHH graduate certificate program for free.

School of Dental Medicine Faculty and Staff: 

All faculty and staff who are eligible for the Tuition Assistance Benefits program for CU Employees will have all admission and matriculations fees, as well as program fees waived. This includes:  

• Application Fees: $50 for domestic applicants and $75 for international applicants
• Background Check Fee (If SDM has not administered a background check for you within the past 12 months): $32.95
• Immunization Confirmation Fee (If SDM cannot provide us a record of record of you meeting the required immunizations or titers): $32.00
  

Faculty and staff should follow the steps to access tuition assistance benefits from the University of Colorado. If you do not qualify for TAB and wish to request an exception, please contact: [email protected].

**Please note that study abroad course credits do not qualify for tuition assistance benefits, nor can we cannot cover its associated program fees or travel-related costs.

School of Dental Medicine Students:

All full-time SDM students and residents are eligible to have tuition, admission and matriculation fees, and program fees waived.

Please notify Laurie Munro, Senior Education Coordinator, that you intend to apply to the certificate program and she will provide you the necessary codes and steps.

Vanessa’s Fund is a scholarship to provide support for activities that advance education, training, and research related to ethics in nursing education and the nursing profession at CU Anschutz Medical Campus.

Applicants who wish to use this scholarship to support their enrollment in the BEHH Graduate Certificate Program should contact Laurie Munro, Senior Education Coordinator.

About Vanessa:

Vanessa Lewis-DeBoer lived and worked in the Denver area as a career oncology social worker and committed her professional life to taking care of patients and families.  Vanessa advocated for patients and families, tirelessly ensuring that they had a voice; she walked beside them through diagnosis, treatment and life changes; and she counseled them on big and small decisions, ranging from medical, emotional to financial matters.  Her inspiration and devotion to patients and families sprang from a transformative moment in her own life.

Thirty years before her death in 2016, Vanessa was the sole survivor of a plane crash.  To honor her miraculous survival, she dedicated her time and energy to supporting persons through their life transitions be they health challenges, personal growth opportunities, loss and bereavement. 

To honor her, Vanessa's family has established a scholarship in her name.  It is a legacy that reflects her spirit and value, and it is an opportunity for recipients to explore their roles as health professionals and to acknowledge their present and future patients. 

The Bioethics and Humanities in Health Graduate Certificate Program participates in the Western Regional Graduate Program (WRGP), which is a tuition-reciprocity arrangement with 15 participating states and 1 Commonwealth.

The WRGP program allows students who are residents of these participating states to pay in-state tuition for the duration of the BEHH program. In addition to Colorado, the participating states include: Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.