HB3801

HB3801 replaces the Statewide Health Coordinating Council with a Health Professions Workforce Coordinating Council focused on workforce data and planning. It also creates nursing advisory and career-pathway work, while repealing the old council’s statutory framework. It took effect September 1, 2025. Final law.

New council and plan. The council is attached to the Department of State Health Services (DSHS), which provides administrative support. Its membership includes at least one representative appointed by each of 15 listed entities—health, education and workforce agencies, professional licensing bodies, and the Texas Veterinary Medical Association—plus four governor-appointed members with relevant health-care experience. That makes at least 19 members, not a fixed 19-seat cap. Members serve at their appointing authority’s pleasure; vacancies are filled the same way as the original appointments.

The council must compile information such as graduation and certification rates, licensed-professional numbers, shortages and federal labor statistics. Its biennial strategic plan must project workforce supply, demand, production and need over 10 years; identify immediate shortages and their systemic causes; assess educational capacity, migration and attrition; recommend program changes and additional education programs; and inventory programs, services and state funding. Publication on its website is due October 1 of each even-numbered year, beginning October 1, 2026. Member designations were due October 1, 2025. These are legal deadlines, not confirmation that the work occurred on schedule.

Three distinct nursing/workforce bodies. A council work group examines health professions and education programs that serve as entry routes into other professions and develops a model tracking their historical growth. A new nursing advisory committee, with a nurse majority and required nursing-association, Nursing Board and nurse-researcher representation, reviews nursing data policies and reports and develops nursing-resource priorities subject to council approval. It is co-chaired by a nurse from the committee and a nurse from the council, must follow the Open Meetings Act, and is exempt from Government Code Chapter 2110’s general advisory-committee rules. Appointments to this committee are due by December 1, 2026; former committee members may be reappointed.

Separately, the Texas Center for Nursing Workforce Studies must oversee a temporary workgroup studying whether nurse aides, medication aides, personal care technicians and people trained in nursing in the U.S. armed forces can have better-aligned certification and career pathways into nursing. It includes five specified agencies’ leaders or designees and relevant academic or health-care professionals. It must examine existing legal standards and ways to avoid duplicative education and report to state leaders and the relevant legislative committees by December 1, 2026. This temporary provision expires January 1, 2027. The study itself does not waive licensing requirements or automatically grant nursing licenses.

Transition and related programs. The old council and its nursing committee were abolished and their member terms ended on September 1, 2025. Their appropriations and unspent, unobligated funds transfer to DSHS for the new council’s establishment and support; DSHS and the new council assume their obligations, property, rights and duties. The law updates the health-professions resource center and nursing-resource-section references to the new bodies. The nursing section remains subject to the existing fee-funding condition.

For two existing health-profession student-grant provisions, DSHS replaces the old council as a consultant on critical shortages; the bill does not newly create the existing up-to-three-times grant amount or remove eligibility and funding conditions. It updates the nursing advisory committee reference used for nursing-education grants, removes the abolished council from postpartum-depression and severe-pregnancy-nausea planning consultations, and writes the existing health-care-facility definition directly into Section 222.022 instead of referencing the repealed chapter. Grant provisions and related health-planning provisions.

What the repeals remove. Repealing Chapter 104 removes the old council’s membership, six-year terms, special conflict/training/removal rules, fee authority, state-health-plan preparation and governor-adoption process, and chapter-specific data-collection framework. The new workforce-planning structure replaces that framework; it does not reproduce every old provision. The repeal also removes the old civil penalty of up to $500 per day, after notice and a 30-day submission period, for failure to supply required data. The act repeals the hospital-reporting provision that referenced that penalty, but not the hospital financial and utilization reporting duty itself. It expressly preserves DSHS data collection under other law. Hospital reporting statute.

The act also removes the former nursing committee’s specific advisory role for the workplace-violence-prevention grant program; it does not repeal that grant program. General privacy, ethics, licensing and reporting laws should not be treated as abolished merely because Chapter 104 is repealed. Workplace-violence grant program.