Implicit Bias: Strategies to Counter Bias in Clinical Interactions and
Maternal Health Care (Recorded Webinar)
Presented by Bernadette Williams-York and Rebeca Segraves
This course meets the requirement for Illinois's implicit bias training on maternal health risk factors for childbearing individuals from marginalized racial and ethnic groups, effective July 1, 2026.
This course is an updated recording of a previously hosted live webinar event, now including additional content on maternal health care. Polling and question submission features are not available for this recording. Format and structure may differ from those of standard Medbridge courses.
As a rehabilitation professional, providing the highest-quality patient care is of the utmost importance and is one of the reasons you entered the profession. While utilizing the latest evidence-based treatment techniques to return your patients to their optimal level of functioning and independence is critical, how effectively and compassionately you interact with your patients will ultimately determine whether they respond to your therapeutic interventions. Research with health professionals has shown that implicit biases affect patient care. We all have implicit biases ingrained in us from childhood; however, gaining awareness of these biases and learning to consciously counteract their influence is critical to improving our interactions with our patients. In this webinar, we will define implicit bias, review current research, explore its effects on the practitioner–patient relationship, and share strategies to combat it.
Learning Outcomes
- Define implicit bias
- Identify the differences between implicit bias, explicit bias, prejudice, and racism
- Identify a plan for how to assess your own implicit biases
- Recognize that practitioners demonstrate implicit bias to the same degree as the general population does
- Recognize social determinants of health and their relationship to health disparities
- Outline how implicit biases may contribute to health barriers and disparities
- Define three strategies to keep your implicit biases from negatively impacting interactions with patients
- Identify how implicit bias contributes to racial and ethnic disparities in maternal mortality and morbidity
- Recognize the maternal health risk factors and warning signs most often minimized or missed in patients from marginalized racial and ethnic groups
- Apply standardized, bias-resistant strategies to prenatal and postnatal care encounters across nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech-language pathology, and athletic training practice
Meet your instructors
Bernadette Williams-York
Dr. Bernadette Williams-York has been an educator in health professional programs for nearly 20 years. She currently serves as associate professor and program director of the Division of Physical Therapy in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, School of Medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington.…
Rebeca Segraves
Dr. Rebeca Segraves, PT, DPT, PWCS is a board-certified pelvic and women’s health clinical specialist. She has extensive experience treating perinatal and pelvic health conditions in acute care, home health, and outpatient settings including long-term hospitalizations for high-risk pregnancy and following perinatal loss. She…
Chapters & learning objectives
1. What Is Implicit Bias?
Information will be shared about the development of the Implicit Association Test and how you can assess your own implicit biases. Differentiations will be made between implicit bias, prejudice, and racism.
2. Impact of Implicit Bias on Health Disparities
A review of clinical research exploring health disparities will be shared. An exploration of social determinants of health and their impact on health disparities will be covered.
3. Strategies to Address Implicit Bias
A review of current research exploring implicit biases in healthcare professionals will be shared. Effective strategies to mitigate the negative impact of implicit bias in the clinician–patient interaction will be discussed.
4. Implicit Bias in Maternal Health Care
This chapter extends the discussion of implicit bias to maternal health care, reviewing racial and ethnic disparities in maternal mortality and the specific risk factors and warning signs most often minimized in marginalized childbearing patients. Two case studies, one in nursing/obstetric care and one in physical therapy, illustrate how bias affects maternity care encounters across disciplines, and the strategies introduced in Chapter 3 are applied specifically to maternity care.
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