AB 456: Healing arts: associate clinical social workers.

Existing law provides for the licensure and regulation of clinical social workers by the Board of Behavioral Sciences, which is within the Department of Consumer Affairs. Existing law requires an applicant for licensure to comply with specified educational and experience requirements. Existing law requires a person who wishes to be credited with experience toward licensure to register with the board as an associate clinical social worker prior to obtaining that experience.

This bill would revise and recast these provisions. The bill would instead require each applicant to have an active registration with the board as an associate clinical social worker in order to gain hours of supervised experience, except that the bill would authorize preregistered postdegree hours of experience to be credited toward licensure in certain circumstances. The bill would allow for this crediting of hours toward licensure if the applicant applies for the associate registration, the board receives the application within 90 days of the granting of the qualifying masters or doctoral degree, and the board subsequently grants the associate registration. The bill would also require, for applicants completing graduate study on or after January 1, 2020, that their experience be obtained at a workplace that requires completed live scan fingerprinting, and that the applicant provide the board with a copy of a completed live scan form, as specified.

Existing law requires each applicant seeking to qualify for licensure as a clinical social worker to complete 3,200 hours of post-masters degree supervised experience related to the practice of clinical social work and provides that a maximum of 1,200 hours can be in client centered advocacy, consultation, evaluation, research, direct supervisor contact, and workshops, seminars, and training sessions, or conferences.

This bill would reduce the number of hours of post-masters degree supervised experience for licensure as a clinical social worker to 3,000 hours and reduce the maximum hours described above to 1,000 hours.

This bill would incorporate additional changes to Sections 4996.18 and 4996.23 of the Business and Professions Code proposed by AB 93 to be operative only if this bill and AB 93 are enacted and this bill is enacted last.