Ohio House Health Committee - 3-18-2026

I apologize for the delay, partly my fault. We will now call this committee together. Would you please give the roll?

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Representative Baker?

Representative Barhorse?

Representative Brownlee checked in.

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We have a quorum. We have on your iPad the minutes from the last meeting. Are there any objections to the minutes of the March 11th meeting? Hearing none, they will be approved as read. Reminder, we have a hard stop today at noon. I will now call in Representative Dieter for a motion. I will call up House Bill 347 for its fourth hearing,

The motion is in order. Will the clerk take the roll? Chair Schmidt? Yes.

Ranking Member Samani? No.

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Shame! Shame!

Thank you, Chair. I move to accept L1617-6, the substitute bill for House Bill 423.

Yes, thank you, Chair. The substitute bill just includes the addition of 120 surgical cases. for surgical technologists. It allows the Director of Health and the Board of Medicine to approve alternative certifying bodies for surgical assistance if they determine the standards meet the education requirements that are equivalent to the current. It removes fines in favor of compliance assistance at the request of the Ohio Hospital Association.

Thank you. Chairwoman Schmidt and members of the House Committee, thank you for the opportunity to submit this testimony. My name is Robin Jenkins. I am an expert in credentialing and certification with more than 20 years of experience in the field. I have served on boards of directors of national and international certifying bodies and managed, as a regulator, 14 licensure boards covering 33 different professions, including surgical technologist and surgical assisting. I'm currently the CEO of the National Board of Surgical Technology and Surgical Assisting, known as NBSTSA.

We are currently the credentialing body for more than 3,000 certified surgical technology and certified surgical assisting professionals in Ohio. And we have nearly 100,000 nationwide certificates. NBS TSA is the largest and most recognized organization, certifying organization for these two professions in the country. NBS TSA received the new subversion of the bill just yesterday. And unfortunately, we were brought into the conversation probably about a month ago. But after receiving the subversion of the bill yesterday, and we did propose new amendments late last night, therefore my prior submitted written testimony, which you all have before you, is actually no longer relevant. But I will speak to some new amendments that we want to propose. House Bill 423 addresses a genuine patient concern safety gap for surgical technologists and surgical assistants who have no consistent credentialing requirements in Ohio. Establishing eligibility and recognition of these professionals who organize the sterile field, pass instruments, assist in incisions, suturing, and wound care is absolutely the right thing to do. And MBS TSA thanks Representative Dieter for her leadership on this issue. I will now talk about proposed amendments from MBS TSA. First, all credentials recognized under HB 423 should be tied to nationally accepted educational standards. Currently, hiring officials, hospitals, ASFs cannot clearly determine whether holders of the NCCT credential have completed industry accepted hands-on clinical experience before being awarded the credential. Second, Ohio hiring officials, hospitals, and ASFs must be assured that professionals are competent and work ready when they walk into the operating room. Second, any alternative recognition of surgical assistants and surgical technologists by the medical director and the Ohio Department of Health director should include accreditation safeguards. For surgical technologists, NCCA accreditation of any certifying organization and CAHB and AHAS educational accreditation for the implementation of national education standards for any education. For surgical assistance, recognition of NCCA certifying bodies moving forward is necessary and would allow for the current recognition of those entities already named in the bill. Finally, the waiver provisions for surgical assistance and surgical technologists facing hospitals and ASF hardships should be public record and public facing. We request that the Medical Board and the Ohio Department of Health should track and publish all requests for waivers, those decisions, and the rationale for those decisions. This allows transparency and accountability as the government should be. NBS TSA respectfully urges the committee to accept the amendments to achieve what the bill was introduced to do, protect the citizens of Ohio, give Ohio hospitals, ASF, legislators, and the public assurance that the lives of Ohio citizens and visitors are not at risk. We are prepared to, and we want to assist in developing statutory language, and we're grateful for the committee's time. Thank you.

My understanding, and I work with both, is there are RN first assistants and then surgical scrub techs, the certified surgical scrub techs. Does this bill, does this legislation apply to the RN first assistants also or people that are nurses that go back to get a first assistant degree? or is this specifically applying to people who are working in the OR, are high school graduates, and then go on to surgical scrub tech school?

Are there any other questions? Representative Gross?

Well, we believe that there are patient safety and patient safety risks that are posed to your patients, and we know that when you're in the operating room, people are exposed. You have your surgeons, you have your nurse anesthetists, you have other health care professionals who all do have credentials that have assured the public that they have met competencies. And so we want to make sure that the credentialed certified surgical technologists and certified first assistants do can assure your public that they, too, have met competency requirements that you would expect of any individual who is in the operating room in your body cavities.

I am not, I don't have that information available to me, but I can supply some information to you. We do know that having certified individuals who work with the public do increase public safety needs, and they have shown that they have the competencies that are necessary to do the work, and we want to make sure that not anybody, because what we have heard from my certificates is that there are people who are not trained who are providing these services, who are in the operating rooms who have no knowledge of ever being in an operating room. I heard from one of my constituents saying that just in northwest Ohio, someone came in, didn't have proper training, didn't know how to scrub, and come in the room, which delayed a critical surgery. And someone could have died because you had a person who was not properly trained and ready to assist in health care. And we don't want that. Right now we do know that folks are pulled from a variety of other areas and hospitals and said you can come into the operating room and do this job, which they cannot because they're not trained properly and they haven't been assessed for competencies. Thank you.

One more. I'm sorry, through the chair. Sure. You may not be able to address this, but this is from one of the written testimonies from the president of the NBSTSA Board of Directors. She's a member. She basically says that actually this bill and this amendment move away from safe credentialing in the OR. And I'm going to quote her here. It says the substitute bill recognizes credentials that do not require verified clinical experience before certification It adds surgical assistant credentials that have not been reviewed by an independent accrediting body It also creates a three delay that combined with a grandfather clause would exempt an unknown and potentially growing number of individuals from ever meeting the standard. So I just want to clarify whether what you're saying or what is being said in this other testimony is accurate. Dr. Krista Haynes is a surgeon on the board of directors for the National Board of Surgical Technology and Surgical Assisting. And she, too, unfortunately, again, we weren't brought into the conversation until about a month ago. And she, too, had the previous version. So, again, last night we received the new subversion of this bill. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for the honor of sharing my opinion and support for House Bill 561. I come from it at a unique perspective, I believe. In the 90s, I started working with children with autism, and all of a sudden vaccines became very controversial. But my line of work and my research was directly focused on how to educate kids with autism, help them live as independently as possible. So I started a school and it very quickly grew to about 650 kids. Because of the controversy in vaccines and immunizations, I had parents frantic. asking for exemptions, positive, whether I say in my submitted testimony, whether it's coincidence, correlation, or causation. I don't think anybody can answer that today, nor can I. But what I did know is I wanted to serve all these parents and kids with autism, whether they wanted immunizations, whether they wanted a lengthened immunization schedule, and I wanted to keep every child in my school healthy. So we have operated for over 25 years, just about 26. We've never had an outbreak. So about 50% of my kids on this spectrum and their siblings, it adds up to about 150, have exemptions. We were not tracking particularly who was vaccinated and who wasn't because we had no outbreaks. We did not have chicken pox. We did not have mumps. We did not have any of those outbreaks. When COVID hit, I started working with an environmental hygienist, and that's what completely changed my outlook. Instead of worrying about immunizations, who had vaccines, who didn't, what their course was and timing, I started focusing on what the environmental hygienists could do for schools. And actually, Odoo, about a year and a half to two years after COVID, started allowing us to use money for some of these environmental hygienic things, such as negative ion that cleanses the air. There's a whole, actually, 28 pages that I submitted to the Ohio Department of Health. But I'm here today to support 561 because I have seen over the last 25 years we've not had outbreaks. We are very, very cautious to strictly hold to the Department of Health guidelines if kids have a temperature of 100 and they're going home. If children have 99 and they have one of their symptoms, they're going home. So I don't want to stand up and say that we did nothing. We just said we are going to honor immunization exemptions because I felt that that was the only way forward to build our program and to serve kids with autism. There are 1.6 million kids in Ohio, students, and if we look at the numbers, the prevalence of autism, that's 47,000 children with autism whose parents are scared to death of immunizations. So I'd like to finish with when we really started looking at vaccinated versus unvaccinated was during COVID. We actually had optional masks, optional vaccines. We had no spread in our school except for one college classroom. We had 10 students, four were vaccinated, the teacher was vaccinated, all of them got COVID. Our non-vaccinated students in that classroom did not get COVID. So we have started to now look at what kids are going out that are vaccinated and are unvaccinated to see if we might be able to provide more information on the topic and encourage other schools to look at other ways to allow parents to have their right of being exempted from the immunization schedule in Ohio. Thank you.

Dr. Samani? Thank you. Through the chair. As somebody who obviously is involved in the structure of your school and is very cautious about what you're doing to prevent infection, would you allow somebody who has symptoms, an infected child, to then come into school if they were unvaccinated or vaccinated if they came in and they said, you know, I have a little cold, I'm sniffling, I'm not sure?

Can you talk to or explain herd immunity and what percentage of your students are vaccinated versus not vaccinated?

one more follow-up thanks so based on what you've said with your percentages you are relying on herd immunity so if the percentages were reversed would you still support this bill where you had more students that were unvaccinated than vaccinated with a higher risk of then having things like measles spread, which we've seen in other communities where herd immunity disappears?

Representative Baker.

to do differently at your school? I probably would not have dozens of parents each year coming in saying this program or this school would not accept my exemption. My first child, after they're 18-month-old, started showing symptoms, and I don't want to do any more vaccines. And I'm able to encourage that person because I feel confident in what we've put in place that if they want to apply for a medical exemption, they'll have a place to have their child educated. I would say I have about a dozen or more parents a year that are coming to me because immunization exemptions are not being granted in other places. Thank you.

Representative Miller. Thank you, Chairwoman. And I'd like to thank you very much for coming in today and sharing your story. I think I heard clear in your testimony, Becky, that you have not had an outbreak happen in your school. Is that correct?

Okay, very good. If you were to have an outbreak in your school of a contagious disease, how would your school handle an outbreak if that would occur?

Are there any other questions of this witness? Thank you so much for your time and your thoroughness. I will now call up Stacey. Copy? Copy? Sorry, Stacey. Welcome to the committee. Hello. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Yes, this for me is actually a very important question. So not enabling my children to go to school that are healthy just because of a vaccine status actually would have been devastating for some of my children. I have four kids. My husband is a landscaper. I am a waitress during the day and a dance teacher at night. I have, out of my four children, we desired for our kids, and we still do, obviously, to hopefully be able to go and have very successful lives. Financially, we rely on or we're hoping for scholarships for all of our children. If my healthy, my boys, all three of my boys, they all play football, and they're good athletes. If there had been an outbreak of any kind in my healthy children during a football season, would have prevented my boys from going to school during that 10-week period of time that they actually are in season. they very potentially could have not received the scholarships that they have. I do currently have a son who is playing in Division I football and is on a full scholarship. Again, now my second son, who's a sophomore, is in the same situation. But if you understand anything about that whole sports world, it's very hard to have those opportunities. The recruiting process relies heavily on their season. If they, like I said, I hope you can understand, if they wouldn't have been able to participate for some reason while they were healthy in their season, it would have changed the course of my son who's currently in school playing forever. And like I said, that's catastrophic for me. It's bad enough when kids have to lose education. We saw that happen during COVID when kids were made to stay home. For people whose children are athletes like myself, we couldn't potentially get 22 kids and have them do a football game in my backyard to make up game time and film and recruiting opportunities for them. So that would potentially be devastating for my children if they were not given that opportunity, especially being healthy.

Absolutely. And then we would deal with that. If that was obviously my I mean, that's a risk that obviously we would be we choose to take if we're choosing not to vaccinate our kids. And I would completely understand that. However, if we're being told we can't just for some strange formality and my children are healthy and they're missing out on that, then that is I feel completely unfair. I just want the transparency and I believe parents need the choice for me. we do choose to take that risk because I believe the risk of them getting those vaccines is more dangerous than what could happen to them as a result of them than not. However I don want my children to be punished forever because we choose to protect them that way Thank you Questions of this witness Thank you so much for your time.

Chair Schmidt, Vice Chair Dieter, Ranking Member Samani, and members of the Health Committee, thank you for the opportunity to provide support testimony today regarding HB 561. My name is Stephanie Stock and I serve as the president of Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom, a grassroots 100% volunteer organization representing thousands of Ohio families who believe strongly in informed consent, medical transparency, and parental rights. During over a decade of volunteer service, I have assisted hundreds of parents in navigating complicated school forms, forms with requirements outside of the law, oftentimes incriminating the parent as being some sort of threat to their children and to others. I have heard countless stories of denial of entrance to daycares and schools across the state with essentially no recourse for parents. In 2018, several Jewish families reached out to me from the Cleveland and Columbus areas, telling me that their elementary schools were no longer accepting conscientious or religious exemptions and were going to strictly monitor accepting any medical exemptions. These schools were both registered non-public chartered schools and were supposed to be required to follow state law. However, they insisted they did not have to comply. I spent almost six months working with a member of the Board of Education and their legal team in an attempt to enforce the school's compliance to the law. ODE wrote one threatening letter to the schools and then took no further action. Because there is no set penalty in state law for noncompliance, the Board of Education had their hands tied. And unfortunately, the majority of those families were forced to leave the state. Parents should not have to leave Ohio to have their parental rights respected. The idea that parents who have vaccines concerned should be inherently aware that they have the right to decline is truly absurd. If all communication coming from the school or the daycare indicates that vaccines are required and the school nurse tells you it's required, then a parent has no reason to suspect otherwise. Many parents will comply with vaccination schedules regardless of their beliefs or medical concerns because of that. And I have attached several examples to the end of my testimony of those kinds of things that have been brought to me over the years. Vaccines are medical procedures with known risk of death and disability. How many children in the state of Ohio have been vaccine injured because an administrator or school nurse was dishonest with a parent? We will never know. Not one infant or child should be put at risk for a vaccine injury simply because the school or daycare facility did not want to be truthful about state-allowed exemptions. Neither the nurse nor the administrator is the one who will suffer the emotional, social, and financial consequences of that injury. The parents will. While we applaud Ohio for being one of the states that has offered parents the right to exemptions, we have fallen short in making sure this law is written in a way that ensures enforcement occurs, that parents are able to make truly informed decisions, and that parents are not badgered or harassed to defend or explain their conscientious beliefs. Parents have reported being asked to complete special school-created exemption forms or submit notarized statements. Some families have been told they must meet with their school administrators or provide written explanation of their beliefs before an exemption is approved. These additional hurdles create pressure and confusion for parents attempting to exercise their rights. HB 561 also addresses outbreak exclusions. Many schools have expanded exclusions far beyond what the law allows. Schools across the state are not just excluding unvaccinated children for the duration of a chickenpox epidemic that exists in the school population, as the law is written. They are often excluding unvaccinated children from school for various other infectious diseases, and they are arbitrarily setting time frames for the exclusion of the child. Parents have been told their child can be excluded for any number of weeks or even months if an outbreak occurs, not just within the school, but even if it's in a surrounding community. Most parents cannot withstand an exclusion of that length, and it may drive them to vaccinate their child against their own better judgment simply out of desperation. HB 561 ensures that only children who are infectious are excluded from school until it is determined they are no longer contagious. Our schools should not be allowed to continue to penalize parents for their vaccination choices by using exclusion as a coercion tactic that discriminates against healthy children. HB 561 is a meaningful step towards transparency, protecting parental rights, and respect for informed consent. It does not eliminate vaccination requirements or prevent families from choosing vaccination for their children, and it does not prevent education. Instead, it ensures that parents receive accurate information about their legal options so they can make informed health care decisions for their children. I respectfully urge this committee to support House Bill 561 and move this important legislation forward. I'm well-versed in the provisions of this bill, so I'm happy to take any questions on any specifics. Thank you.

Yes, thank you. Through the chair. So a lot of this anti-vaccine rhetoric is based on a paper that was flawed. Wakefield lost his medical license. All of it was essentially debunked. The journal retracted the information. But yet you're saying we should build legislation on scientific evidence that has totally been debunked. So I don't know when we already have laws protecting people who want to be exempted from vaccines, why we need to equate anti-vaccine misinformation or lies with proponent and good public health data.

We've had exemptions since the 70s. So we're talking about having enforcement in place when schools violate the law. When daycares violate the law, there's going to be enforcement in place. So we're not asking for anything new. We're not telling anyone not to vaccinate, by the way. I support everyone's right to vaccinate. vaccinate. I've never opposed a bill that expanded vaccination opportunities for anyone in the state, nor would OMF ever oppose a bill like that. This bill is simply about transparency and enforcement. If you have a criminal that commits a crime and you have no police to arrest them, what is the benefit, right? We're talking about enforcement and we're talking about transparency, so your reference to science is irrelevant on this issue.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you for being here today. Um, I'm aware of a poll. I think it's from maybe the Brownstein Brownstone Institute, um, about parental choice and voters and the way they feel about, um, their right to make informed decisions and their choice to refuse vaccines for their children. Can you, do you have any information on that? Sure. Yeah. And there's been kind of this stigma that it's very fringe that parents would want parental rights regarding vaccination. And the poll you're referring to was a Brownstone Institute poll from February of this year. They had 1000 voters and it was spread out between Republicans, Democrats and independents. So the poll was only actually weighted about 37 percent Republican. The rest was Democrat and independents. And specifically the statistic on parental rights for them to be able to refuse vaccine for their children was 65.7% of Republicans, Democrats, and independents agree with a parent's right to make that choice. Not whether or not vaccines cause injury, not whether or not vaccines cause autism, but do the parents have the right to dictate their children's health with regard to vaccination? And 65.7% of voters across all political parties agreed. You're welcome.

Thank you, Chair. And thank you, Stephanie, for coming in and for the great work you do to fight for people's medical freedom. There's no question as the sponsor of the bill, we certainly are in agreement that we share a mutual concern about unvaccinated kids being discriminated against any exclusion. you know, when they might be sick in school or daycare or wherever that might be. Do you have any information? Because this seems to be the concern of this bill in particular. Are you aware of any type of information or statistics or study on why unvaccinated kids would be any greater threat to a community than adults who are not up to date on their vaccinations? Is there anything that you're aware of that would support that statement?

Representative Baker.

Sure, and I can send you a breakdown of all of that, actually. The death rates are extremely low, even in child populations. But yes, I will get you all of those statistics, absolutely. I can give them to all the committee if they're interested. Thanks.

Follow? Thank you. Hearing no more questions for this witness. Thank you so much for your testimony and your time.

This concludes the second hearing on House Bill 561. With no further business before the committee today, the meeting is adjourned. Thank you so much.