I have, both personally and professionally, spent a lot of time in health care settings. It comes with the territory of a) having aging parents and b) being a nurse.
In 2017, my mother spent over a month in the hospital for a bowel obstruction that turned into a perforated small intestine. She was in the ICU and -- for a while -- it was touch-and-go. In the last few years of his life, my father was in and out of the hospital with various maladies. In March of 2020, he had sepsis, which led to kidney failure. He declined dialysis and came home on hospice.
And I've worked in both long- and short-term acute care as well as home care.
The common theme in all of that was that neither I nor my parents cared about the racial makeup of the nursing staff. What we did care about was quality, competent care.
That, apparently, is no longer a priority in our health system. I've written about DEI in healthcare many times in the past, and I come back to the same message: wokeness in healthcare kills.
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So when this story came to my attention, I added it to the ever-growing pile of evidence that the Left doesn't care how many people die, so long as it's in service to their agenda:
Here’s How Much The Federal Government Is Spending To Make Nurses Less Whitehttps://t.co/zb1cpSI4am — the @ANANursingWorld is comprised by liberal hacks &the main reason as a RN I refuse to be associated with. There is no room for DEI hires when it comes to your health
— Erica 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@EricaRN4USA) April 23, 2025
Here's more from The Daily Wire:
Applications for the 2025 iteration closed last month, and the Health Resources and Services Administration estimates that it will shell out over $22 million on the program in July when the funds are set to be awarded. The program’s Notice of Funding lays out the purposes of the program, which include increasing racial minorities enrolled in nursing programs and increasing the number of minorities who receive “support” to stay in nursing programs.
The notice refers to a glossary from the Bureau of Health Workforce to define “underrepresented” racial and ethnic minorities. This definition excludes both whites and Asians, and only includes American Indians or Alaska Natives, black or African Americans, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islanders, and Hispanics.
According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, 76% of the 2,033 students who were trained under the program from the 2022-2024 school year “identified” as an underrepresented minority, meaning that they were neither white nor Asian.
The logic (and I use that term loosely) is related to the debunked notion that health outcomes improve when patients are cared for by 'culturally competent' providers or ones who '[share] cultural characteristics' (emphasis added):
But Do No Harm says that “the weight of the evidence indicates that diversity has no bearing on health outcomes,” pointing to analysis conducted by the organization that found that four out of five existing systemic reviews of racial concordance in medicine showed no improvement in health outcomes.
“The point really is that we as a society, when we’re on the gurney, when we’re in the ER, when were in the outpatient office, we want the very best in the provider, and no matter who that is, no matter their race, color is,” Miceli said. “We want the very best provider taking care of us, and that’s absolutely essential for medicine.”
My primary care provider, whom I've known since I was five years old (he cared for my grandfather), is of Indian descent. So is my OB-GYN and the gastroenterologist who addressed some GI issues I had last summer. My OB-GYN diagnosed and treated some pretty serious fibroid tumors back in 2004, and I was able to have my boys thanks to his care. So the notion that my outcomes would've been better had my doctors been white women is, in fact, a lie.
The problem with health outcomes has less to do with the racial makeup of providers and more to do with the Left's denial of science, including the very real racial differences between patient groups. Black patients, for example, have higher serum creatinine levels (something that indicates kidney function). This means a normal creatinine level for a Black patient may be indicative of late- or end-stage renal failure in a White patient. A year ago, I told you how woke doctors messed up a transplant list by eliminating that racial disparity because -- you guessed it -- it was 'racist.'
How many people died because of this? I haven't been able to find solid numbers, but I'm willing to bet it's not zero.
There are also issues of health literacy and compliance -- neither of which is positively addressed by diversifying health care providers. They are negatively impacted, however, by the Left telling minority patients their White healthcare providers are racists who want them to die.
Nursing as a profession faces a shortage that will continue through at least 2030. The average age of working RNs is 50 years old, and with an aging Baby Boomer population, the demands for nursing care will increase. Nurse burn out -- especially post-pandmic, is high. And due to bottlenecks and enrollment hurdles, enrollment in BA nursing programs dropped for the first time in 2022.
How will excluding White and Asian nurses make up for this shortfall? It won't.
And, as always, it comes back to an issue of competency. I knew a nurse intern, hired under diversity program parameters, who couldn't identify basic female anatomy and ended up causing harm to a patient. That mistake would've gotten someone like me fired.
Nurses spend more time with patients than doctors. We are the first ones to notice when there's a change in patient condition, and we are often the ones who point out issues to the doctors. Some estimates say RNs spend two to four hours a shift with each patient during a shift while doctors spend ten to 20 minutes. We administer medications, too -- some of them dangerous and high risk. You don't want a nurse who doesn't know the difference between milligrams and micrograms when she's giving your loved one fentanyl.
This requires that nurses know their stuff, like how to recognize the early signs of sepsis or stroke or how to properly dose and administer medications. A mistake can be deadly, even if it's unintentional. The best way to avoid those mistakes is to focus on skill and competency, not skin color.
Our government should not be spending money to make nursing staff more diverse, nor should it tolerate woke programs in nursing or medical schools.
It is not only discriminatory, but it also puts patients' lives at risk.
