Dr. Jeffrey Oak

Jeff Oak is Senior Vice President and a member of the senior leadership team for Bon Secours Health System, Inc. (BSHSI), an integrated, not-for-profit, Catholic health system operating in 7 states, with 22,000 employees and an annual budget of $3.6 billion, where he has served since 2005.  The mission of BSHSI is "to bring compassion to health care and to be Good Help to Those in Need®, especially those who are poor and dying."  He is a nationally recognized leader with a proven track record of building ethics and compliance programs for large, mission-driven organizations, and leading in a way that highlights the importance of sustainable culture change. 

Prior to BSHSI, he held a career appointment in the Senior Executive Service in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), where he led the compliance and business integrity program for the nation’s largest integrated health system, with 180,000 employees providing care to over 5 million veterans in 160 hospitals.  At the conclusion of his tenure he received VHA’s highest award, the Under Secretary for Health’s Exemplary Service Award. 

He has published extensively, been recognized in Who’s Who in the World and was named as the 2002 Fellow of the Health Ethics Trust.  He currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Ethics Resource Center Fellows Program (a nonprofit organization advancing high ethical standards in private and public institutions), the Board Organizational Integrity and Audit Committee for Trinity Health in Novi MI, the Board of Directors for Bon Secours St. Francis Health System in Greenville SC and currently serves on the faculty for the Managing Ethics in Organizations course, jointly sponsored by Bentley University and the Ethics and Compliance Officers Association.

In addition to MDiv and STM degrees from YDS, he also holds a PhD in ethics from the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he was awarded the Prize Fellowship for Teaching Excellence.   He is ordained in the United Methodist Church and married to Carol Pinkham Oak, also a graduate of YDS, who serves as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Ellicott City MD.  They are the parents of two adult children, Nathaniel and Julia.