Kentucky nurses who refuse ‘racism training’ face non-renewals
Nurses in Kentucky who do not study racism as part of their medical training may not have their licenses renewed or may face other forms of discipline.
The Kentucky Board of Nursing has mandated that nurses take a racism course as part of their continuing education by July 1st. The course, developed by the Kentucky Nurses Association, teaches that racism “can be a contributing factor in hypertension, maternal health, low birth weight and prematurity, heart disease, diabetes, increased body mass index, depression, anxiety, and stress,” according to the Washington Examiner.
"They pretty much said we're all guilty of being racist, and we need to examine the way that we take care of patients and change our behaviors because we are giving substandard care," said Registered Nurse Rebecca Wall, who has 40 years of experience.
Nurses are taught in the course that Whites are naturally guilty of racism even if they abstain from racial tensions, which is called “White silence”. Whites are also racist if they do not view people with other skin colors as different from them. Saying things like, “There’s only one human race” is frowned upon as an example of “covert racism”. Similarly, liking people of color (POC) is called “fetishizing POC” and is also covert racism.
Wall said the course’s instructors are "academics entrenched in woke ideology” and are not practicing hands-on patient care.
"So we hear from academic nurses who haven't been on the floors or in the hospitals for decades, telling us how to do the job," she said.
The Kentucky Board of Nursing told the Washington Examiner that nurses are required to take the course by legislation "considered and passed" in the Kentucky State Assembly, adding that "failure to do it could result in a civil sanction or discipline."
Medical advocacy group Do No Harm Program Manager Laura Morgan says “discipline” may include the non-renewal of a license.
Racism has been made a central factor in medicine by establishment leaders, both in medical education and medical practice.
According to a recent policy last month by the American Medical Association (AMA), for example, determining obesity by measuring a person’s body mass index (BMI) is now racist.
Calculating a patient’s BMI — their weight divided by the square of their height — is the most common method physicians use to diagnose obesity. A BMI score of 30 or above is considered obese.
But the AMA decided to drop BMI as the prevailing method because of “racist exclusion”.
“Under the newly adopted policy, the AMA recognizes issues with using BMI as a measurement due to its historical harm, its use for racist exclusion, and because BMI is based primarily on data collected from previous generations of non-Hispanic white populations,” says the policy.
Instead, physicians should rely more on “measurements of visceral fat, body adiposity index, body composition, relative fat mass, waist circumference and genetic/metabolic factors.”
