Health Care Ethics Faculty
Amy M. Haddad, PhD
Dr. Amy Marie Haddad is the Director of the Center for Health Policy & Ethics and the Dr. C.C. and Mabel L. Criss Endowed Chair in the Health Sciences at Creighton University. She has been involved in higher education in the health sciences since 1979. She has a BSN from Creighton University, an MSN from University of Nebraska Medical Center, and a PhD from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Among her publications are several books including: The Health Professional and Patient Interaction (7th ed.) with Dr. Ruth Purtilo (2007) and Case Studies in Pharmacy Ethics (2nd ed.) with Dr. Robert Veatch (2007). She was selected for the national Carnegie Scholars program of the Carnegie Center for the Advancement of the Scholarship of Teaching in 2001. As part of her Carnegie project, Dr. Haddad evaluated various methods of teaching applied ethics including the use of standardized patients.
Helen Stanton Chapple, PhD
In the course of obtaining her PhD in Anthropology and Masters in Clinical Ethics, Dr. Chapple has pursued her interests in dying as it occurs in the American hospital. Her dissertation research was an ethnographic study comparing dying in two hospitals. Her current research interests involve the study of nursing recommendations for palliative care. Dr. Chapple came to Creighton in 2007 after 20 years of bedside nursing in a variety of settings. She served on the University of Virginia Health System’s Ethics Committee for 10 years. An active member of the Association for Death Education and Counseling, she served as its President in 2007-2008. Dr. Chapple teaches ethics to traditional nursing undergraduate students at Creighton while pursuing an MSN in Clinical Systems Administration. She is writing her dissertation into a book for Left Coast Press.
Richard L. O’Brien, MD
Dr. Richard O’Brien graduated from Creighton University School of Medicine, was trained in general Internal Medicine at Bellevue Hospital in New York, was in the department of Molecular Biology at the Walter Reed Army institute of Research, on the faculty of the School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, where he was Director to the Kenneth Norris, Jr., Comprehensive Cancer Center and Research Hospital and Institute. He was Dean of the Creighton University School of Medicine from 1982-1992 and Vice-President, Health Sciences 1984-1999. Since 1999 he has been a member of the Center for Health Policy & Ethics, which he established in 1985 because of his concern about the lack of formal ethics thinking in the formulation of health policy. His primary interests and activities at the present time are health care reform and human subjects research ethics.
Christy Rentmeester, PhD
Dr. Christy Rentmeester is a member of the faculty at the Center for Health Policy & Ethics in the Creighton University School of Medicine. Trained as a philosopher, her academic interests focus on the intersections of ethics and humanities in health professions education and upon applications of moral and social & political theory to justice problems in healthcare, particularly those dealing with service provision to patients with mental illnesses. Dr. Rentmeester’s recent work also focuses upon cultivating health professions students’ skills of clinical moral perception and upon developing strategies for teaching health sciences students about disparities in healthcare. She teaches and serves on the Case Consultation Subcommittee of the Creighton University Hospital’s Ethics Committee. She is a member of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and the American Public Health Association.
John R. Stone, MD, PhD
Dr. John Stone’s education includes a BA, Emory University; MD, Johns Hopkins University; MA (Philosophy), University of Montana; PhD (Philosophy), Brown University. Dr. Stone practiced cardiology, co-founded the Institute of Medicine and Humanities (Missoula, Montana), and was Associate Professor at the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care, Tuskegee University, Alabama (a historically black university). Social justice is an overarching emphasis in his work. A main bioethical focus is health inequalities that adversely affect minority populations. These concerns flow through work related to health policy, research ethics, cross-cultural health interventions, whiteness, institutional transformation, and humanistic healthcare. Dr. Stone’s activities include scholarship, writing, teaching, grant development, and programmatic work.
Jos V.M. Welie, PhD
Dr. Jos Welie studied medical sciences and law at the University of Maastricht and philosophy at the Radboud University of Nijmegen (both in The Netherlands), as well as clinical ethics at Loyola University Chicago. He is a Professor at the Center for Health Policy and Ethics with secondary appointments in Creighton’s Graduate and Dental Schools, and served as Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Theology of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Italy (2005-06). He is on the board of several international associations and journals, and has (co-)authored/edited over 150 publications. His most recent books are Death and Medical Power: An Ethical Analysis of Dutch Euthanasia Practice (With H. ten Have; Open University Press, 2005) and Justice in Oral Health Care: Ethical and Educational Perspectives (Marquette University Press, 2006).
Beth Furlong, PhD
Beth Furlong has nursing degrees from three institutions (RN from Mercy School of Nursing, Davenport, IA, BSN from Marycrest College, Davenport, IA, and a MS from the University of Colorado, Boulder, CO). She obtained her PhD in Political Science (Health Policy major) from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE and her JD from Creighton University, Omaha, NE. She has integrated her public health nursing and health policy passions, education, and experience with her law degree. She has taught and mentored many students and health professionals in health policy to be effective change agents in changing laws to have increased health status for the public and to do so in a socially just manner. Social justice is the basis of her nursing, policy, and law interests. She has volunteered, taught, and consulted in many developing countries and is consistently very community and civically engaged in Omaha. She currently serves on two NIH councils which are advisory to the Director of NIH.
