A bill that would require public medical schools in Washington to adopt health equity curriculum for their students cleared the Senate Ways and Means Committee today.
Senate Bill 5228, sponsored by Senator Emily Randall, requires the state’s two public medical schools to establish such curriculum that may include instruction on relating to health disparities, intercultural communication skills training, cultural safety training, and implicit bias. The bill also requires them to create a goal regarding student representation and report progress on that goal annually. WSU already is in compliance with the curriculum requirements in the bill and is supporting the measure.
“In just our fourth year of instruction, WSU’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine is uniquely positioned having just developed a modern curriculum that we’re now calibrating,” WSU Director of State Relations Chris Mulick told the Senate Higher Education and Workforce Development Committee last month. “We develop a modern curriculum that is heavy on empathy for patients, whoever they are.”
The Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine’s curriculum already includes components relating to bias, racism in medicine, sexism in medicine, health equity in population health, navigating bias in the workplace, LGBTQ health disparities, ethics of access to health care, caring for patients with disabilities, and health literacy and language barriers.
5228 now heads to the Senate Rules Committee where it can be pulled to the chamber floor for a vote. You can watch Mulick’s full testimony here (beginning at 2:00:08).