A veteran nurse slammed the Virginia General Assembly’s latest bill that would force nurses across the commonwealth to receive implicit bias training in order to obtain and keep their medical licenses.
“The bill proposes that without the implicit bias training, that licenses will not be able to be renewed, and this is a little surprising in a time when we’ve heard much news about the lack of nurses and physicians available to take care of patients already,” Laura Morgan, a nurse and chief of staff of Do No Harm, said in a radio interview on WMAL’s O’Connor and Company.
Senate Bill 35 directs the Board of Medicine and the Board of Nursing to “require that persons licensed by the Board complete continuing learning activities on the topics of unconscious bias and cultural competency.”
“Such unconscious bias and cultural competency training shall be required for every license renewal period for licensees of the Board,” the bill said.
Morgan told WMAL on Monday that she has heard from nurses in other states where bias training has been mandated.
“Some of them are leaving the profession over it because they don’t want to agree with those principles,” she said.
The Do No Harm spokeswoman said that the nursing profession is already trained to treat patients equally, and many medical professionals are feeling “insulted” by the push for implicit bias training that threatens their licenses.
“Physicians and nurses are taught from day one to treat all patients equally, but unfortunately concepts like implicit bias go along with other concepts such as health equity which doesn’t have anything to do with equality,” Morgan said.
The bill is sponsored by three Democrats, state Sens. Mamie Locke, Jennifer Carroll Foy, and Lashrecse Aird, and one lone Republican, Sen. Chris Head from the Roanoke area.
Morgan expressed disappointment with Head’s support of the bill to require mandatory training for medical professionals.
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“It’s really disappointing that this happened because the concepts of implicit bias are really in direct opposition to what equality means. To go along to bring about some sort of utopian state of health equity, which is not conceivable, is surprising,” she said.
The mandatory bias training would cost close to $3.5 million starting in 2025 and would require the respective medical boards to have five new full-time equivalent positions with a salary of $140,750 each.
