About this course
This course prepares Maryland nurses and other licensed health professionals to recognize how structural racism operates inside health care systems and to act on it in everyday clinical work. It opens with the definition Maryland itself adopted in Health-General 20-1301 — the totality of ways in which societies foster racial discrimination by mutually reinforcing systems of housing, education, employment, earnings, benefits, credit, media, health care, and criminal justice — and separates that systemic meaning from implicit bias and from individual prejudice, because the three call for different remedies. Learners then trace specific mechanisms: residential segregation and where hospitals sit, insurance and payment design, workforce composition, race-adjusted clinical algorithms such as the older estimated glomerular filtration rate equations, measurement error in pulse oximetry, documented bias in pain assessment, and maternal and infant outcomes. Maryland data from the Maternal Mortality Review, the Vital Statistics infant mortality report, and the Health Equity Resource Communities program ground the problem locally. Applied scenarios work through pain, triage and escalation, language access, documentation language and referral, and discharge planning. The course closes with individual, team, and organizational strategies, the National CLAS Standards, stratified measurement, honest answers to common objections, and resources for continued learning. It is designed to support the implicit bias and structural racism training attestation required at license renewal under Health Occupations 1-225.