Health and Human Services

Tuesday, February 24, 2026·33m·▶ Watch / Listen

The Virginia House Health and Human Services Committee advanced fifteen Senate bills, including nursing home oversight legislation, mental health parity reforms, and a centralized child abuse hotline, with most bills passing unanimously or near-unanimously; the sole contested bill, SB 738 on psychiatric emergency departments, passed 14 to 2.

Key Actions

·SB 405 – Virginia Health Workforce Development Authority; nursing scholarshipsPassed

+ 14 more actions

Controversies

SB 738 – Two dissenting votes on psychiatric emergency departments

SB 738 was the only bill in the block or individual votes to draw more than one dissenting vote in full committee, passing 14 to 2. The transcript noted there had been some questions about the bill, but the identities of the two dissenting members and their specific objections are unclear from the transcript.

+ 1 more controversy

Notable Quotes

“Senate Bill 555 is a very narrow bill. It's language that the Virginia Healthcare association brought to me in down the hall and that we adopted. And just as a very simple thing that if you, if someone is in a nursing home and they miss the physician visit with the nursing home resident, they just have to notify the family. That currently is not done. That's not the law.”
Senator Sturtevant — Senator Sturtevant was describing the purpose of SB 555, which requires nursing homes to notify families when a scheduled physician visit is missed — a protection he noted does not currently exist in Virginia law.

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Votes

Report block of SB 405, SB 580, SB 735, SB 813Passed

Report SB 738Passed

Incorporate SB 555 into SB 429No Vote

Report SB 429 with substitutePassed

Move substitute for SB 270No Vote

Report SB 270 with substitutePassed

Report SB 305 with substitutePassed

Move substitute for SB 524No Vote

Report SB 524 with substitutePassed

Move substitute for SB 640No Vote

Report SB 640 with substitute and refer to AppropriationsPassed

Report SB 736Passed

Report SB 331Passed

Report SB 418Passed

Report SB 421Passed

Move amendments for SB 535No Vote

Report SB 535 as amendedPassed

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TranscriptPreview

Good morning. Good morning. Welcome to the full Health and Human Services Committee meeting. I'm your host and chairman delegate, Rodney Willa. Great to have you here this morning. Trying to make it friendly. Make it friendly. We're on. We're all on. We're going to go ahead and call the roll. Okay. And we're good on quorum. Okay, very good. Or again. Well, welcome, everyone. We've got, again, fair number of bills that move through today, but we'll do some of these through a block, and I think that will keep us moving pretty efficiently. And what I wanted to do is start out with that block and ask the members of the committee if there are any in this first block that you would want to address separately or are they okay to stay in the block? Yeah, starting with SB 405 and going down to. Yeah, just the ones on our first list. There are four of them. Okay. Now I will read. Just real quickly read those and then we can vote on the black in there. No amendments or substitutes with the first four here. So I'll just quickly go through these. We've got SB 405…

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