Texas nurse fired for refusing 'implicit bias' training: 'Very degrading to the profession'
Growing number of states requiring 'implicit bias' training for health care employees
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}A Texas nurse is pushing back against "implicit bias" training in the health care industry, which resulted in her being terminated from her job.
Nurse Laura Morgan joined "America's Newsroom" Monday to discuss her refusal to take the mandated training course and her firing as a result.
"Implicit bias training does operate on the concept that all health care workers are implicitly biased against their patients and must make decisions at the point of care based on things that don't have anything to do with the medical care of the patient," Morgan said.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"This type of training and other radical ideologies that are infiltrating health care, are really causing divisiveness between the relationship of trust between doctors and nurses and their patients."
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Photo of nurse tending to sick patient. (Martin Barraud via Getty Images)
Morgan argued the course tells health care workers to "look at their patients through an ideological lens instead of a clinical one" and emphasized that this takes away the focus from health care providers to meet their patients' medical needs.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Morgan also called the course "degrading" to the profession.
"Nurses, doctors, and other health care professionals in these states where the training is mandated, are not able to obtain their licenses without taking this training, which tells them that they are unconsciously biased against their patients and make poor decisions based on those biases that result in poor patient outcomes," she said.
Morgan's employer, Dallas-based Baylor Scott & White Health, rolled out the "Overcoming Unconscious Bias" course within its annual training courses in September 2021, she wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week .
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After reviewing the interactive course, Morgan wrote that she contacted her supervisor and human resources with her concerns but was not given an exemption. She was terminated in February.
"The idea of implicit bias is grounded in the belief that white people treat those who aren’t white worse than those who are. It’s part of the woke assumption that society, including health care, suffers from ‘systemic racism.’ Accordingly, my own supposed implicit bias, which is a euphemism for ingrained racism, must be rooted out. Not only that, it must be replaced with preferential treatment for the nonwhite. I fail to see how real racial discrimination is justified by my nonexistent racism," she wrote.