Results from meta-studies suggest that most implicit bias training for healthcare providers has flawed methodology

Through analysis of data from several studies, a small team of psychologists and public health specialists from the University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, Old Dominion University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that most implicit bias training efforts suffer from flawed methodology and translational gaps that compromise their integrity.

In their paperpublished in the magazine Scientific progressthe group notes that little scientific evidence shows that such training programs lead to reductions in bias.

Implicit bias is defined as a type of learned stereotype that is automatic for a given individual, generally associative, unintentional, and usually deeply ingrained.

Previous research has shown that implicit bias can influence behavior, such as paying less attention to black pregnant women in health care settings due to unconscious, stereotypical beliefs that black women tend to complain more when they experience “normal” problems. Such behavioral biases have been shown to lead to higher rates of adverse outcomes for black women during pregnancy and childbirth than for white women.

Over the past few decades, the healthcare industry has studied implicit biases and found them to be problematic. That’s why she has sought to address bias in healthcare through what has become known as “implicit bias training.”

In this new study, the research team found evidence to suggest that many of these training programs use techniques that have no scientific basis, a finding that suggests that many healthcare institutions or facilities are merely paying lip service to the problem rather than trying to solve it.

The researchers analyzed 77 studies conducted between January 2003 and September 2022 that addressed implicit bias training for health care workers. As part of that effort, they looked at how the bias training programs were designed and implemented, whether there were gaps in knowledge translation, and if so, whether these would reduce the reliability and/or validity of the training.

The results showed that there was little scientific evidence in the studies to support such efforts. They also found little evidence to suggest that such training efforts have any meaningful impact on the people being trained; they found no measurable impact on behavioral changes of people who had completed implicit training programs.

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