Episode 153 | Clinical Supervision Directory with Amy Parks

Maureen Werrbach

Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of the Group Practice Exchange Podcast. I am so excited I have my friend Amy Parks on with me. She is a group practice owner and many of you listeners probably know who she is. But we’re gonna be talking about something new and exciting coming up for her. Hey, Amy!

Amy Parks

Hi, how are ya?

Maureen Werrbach

Good. How are you?

Amy Parks

I’m doing great.

Maureen Werrbach

I mean, you and I have been chatting now for a half hour. So we’ve got a lot of catch up that we haven’t been able to do in so long. But I’m super excited. We just chatted for like a minute about this ‘cause I didn’t want to get too into it before getting on the podcast. But this new thing you’re doing that’s going to be coming out in like–

Amy Parks

Yeah! It’s so funny, I think I had too much time on my hands during the pandemic because clearly I realized that this needed to happen. And I needed to do it during the pandemic. And then I decided to do it. And my accountant said, you know, Amy, this is actually a real thing. You have to get a real LLC and a real bank account and real staff and this is a real thing. And I’m like, oh shoot, it’s not just a thing, a little thing. This is a big thing. So it’s really exciting. So I’m so excited to be with you to make the official announcement because you’re the first podcast of the 21 podcasts we want to do in 2021 to announce this clinical supervision directory.

Maureen Werrbach

Oh my god, I feel very honored that I get to be the first Okay. Spill the beans already.

Amy Parks

Absolutely. So um a small but illustrious team of clinical supervisors and clinicians in the United States are launching the first national clinical supervision directory for to start with counselors but to grow with licensed clinical social workers, LMFTs, play therapists, EMDR specialists, equine therapists, all the mental health clinicians and all of our allied health professionals who require supervision. And so what happened or what’s been happening, I guess, over the years and and I think everyone listening can relate to this story is that, you know, in my clinical supervision work as an LPC supervisor, so many people say to me, oh my gosh, I’m so glad I found you. Oh, it was so hard to find the supervision. Oh, it’s so hard to find a supervisor. I found out about you from my friend of a friend, or my professor knew you or …all kinds of different ways of finding people. Kind of we make a joke that you know, that’s like luck on the back of a truck is kind of how you how you get found. And, you know, googling for your clinical supervision is not the way you should be determining the person who’s going to guide your professional career.

Maureen Werrbach

Oh my God, no.

Amy Parks

That’s how you should find the person who fixes your hot water heater. Not how you should find the person who’s going to direct and assist you in figuring out diagnosis and treatment planning and all of the things that you need to become an amazing and great clinician in our mental health space. So our states do an adequate job to some extent of trying to to share clinical supervisor information, but every state is different. Yeah, they’re all very siloed. So long about November, I guess I, I don’t know what I was doing, I must have been drinking too much, or I don’t know what, I was being crazy. But I said, I’m just gonna do it. I’m just going to do it. And so I actually called–I think I called you and I’m like, so I’m gonna do this thing, should I do this thing? And you’re like, yeah, I think you should do this thing. Here’s a developer to call and like, I kind of interviewed a few developers and, and decided to go for it. And so we met with a developer and started developing and at the same time, we started developing the site we started researching. So I hired a team. There are three of us, two of us are clinicians. One is an admin right now. And we started researching. And so what we have done during the time, since November is we have built a library of material, we know how every state including DC, so 51, you know, locations, 50 states plus DC, which will hopefully be a state soon–and Canada–how every state approved supervisors, how they execute supervision, and how they list their supervisors. So I know how every state in the country does supervision, I have access to every list of supervisors in the entire country. Well, we have connections with every board like licensing board in the country. And in addition to that, we have spoken with all 460k CACREP accredited universities. So we are ready to hit the ground with a bang!

Maureen Werrbach

I just want to say you started this conversation with with making this realization that this little thing is not going to be this little thing. And it’s huge. It’s huge. The amount of work you put into it already!

Amy Parks

We are ready to hit the ground connecting supervision seekers, with supervisors right away. And because we saw as we started digging in, what a mess it is, what a mess, and it’s no shame on any states part or any individual organizations part. It’s partly because of the system. You know, I mean, we all know as clinicians how hard it is to go from state to state and how portability is such a mess. Yeah, and the same is true for supervision and licensure. And the way supervisors are listed. And, you know, it’s just crazy. I mean, in Connecticut, for example, the same licensing board the same regulatory body that that regulates supervision, also regulates tattoo parlors.

Maureen Werrbach

that seems like the perfect place for me to go,

Amy Parks

Right? Perfect combination. Yeah, there you go. They say we check, we review the list of supervisors weekly and updated. Well, that’s all great, except for, there’s no mechanism for us as supervisors to get the board our updated information she needs. So it’s great that you update it, but I don’t know how to get you my update. So if I move from Northern Virginia to Virginia Beach, I don’t know how to make sure you get my address. So there’s no like form or strategy for that that’s easy to navigate. The only state that’s really done it right is Alaska. And Alaska has had to do it right, because they’re so huge, that they have to take advantage of technology to make sure everybody gets their information.

Maureen Werrbach

Interesting. So with you kind of being in this phase of developing the site, which you’re saying will launch, don’t say how many weeks because when this comes out, it might be a couple weeks later.

Amy Parks

Yeah, it’s supposed to launch the plan is that we’re supposed to launch probably in early July, okay. And that’s going to be kind of our soft launch. We have a lot of people across the country–we we kind of pretend like we’re fishing. And as we get people that sign on to our landing page, which will give the URL it’s pretty easy, except it’s hard to spell clinical correctly every –we have a shortcut for that. But it’s clinical supervision directory dot com which is our landing page right now. So every time someone signs on to that and subscribes it’s like fishing because we get a little notice saying somebody from Ohio signed up, somebody from Florida, somebody from Minnesota! So we need Midwesterners. Those are the states we have not hit.

Maureen Werrbach

It’s on my task list!

Amy Parks

I’m telling you meet the Midwest. Every time, we have a ton of California. We have a ton of like Florida and like Texas and but like we have the peripheral states, but we don’t have the middle of the country. So it’s really kind of funny. So anyway, um, but every time somebody signs up, it’s like fishing, but um, we’re supposed to have kind of a soft launch mid summer. And then we’re going to have a super big kickoff explosion at the ACES convention in October in Atlanta, and we’re going to have a huge table. We’re gonna have a big cocktail party for all of our clinical directory members that are in the area, that’s awesome. Going to be a big shebang.

Maureen Werrbach

Okay, so tell me, where are you at in terms of what you anticipate or expect it to feel like for clinicians who are seeking a supervisor and supervisors who are seeking to provide supervision. And this is going to be different than like, how does this compare to things like Psychology Today, and how they match and all that stuff?

Amy Parks

So okay, so first of all, I want to point out how funny it was and hard for you to pick that language apart. supervision seekers, seekers of supervision supervisors, I want to note that every state has different language that they call their supervisors and supervisees and supervision seekers, etc, etc, associate intern, resident, blah, blah, blah, why is that? Why do we have to have different names for everything in the country, that’s just doesn’t make any sense. So one of the things we’ve done is given you the alphabet soup, so you know, every state in the country what they’re called. So that’s, that’s sort of when you sign up with us, you get that right away. So you know what at least everyone is called throughout the United States, because that’s crazy.

So on our site its called supervision seeker, and then supervisor. So what it feels like is when you get to our landing page, there’s actually a little video that kind of walks you through the experience. But basically, it just says, are you a supervision seeker, click here, and it takes you straight, you have to sign up and give us your email address first and a little bit of disclosure, saying, you know, you know what we’re doing and that kind of stuff. And then it takes you straight into the directory, and you can search by state, you can search by specialty.

So for example, say you’re looking for somebody that works with children and teens, because that’s your interest. Or you’re looking for somebody that works with adults or couples. Now, because as a supervision seeker, you, you want to have a broad experience, but you also want somebody that can help guide you towards a little bit of your area of interest. So you can’t normally search under those terms with your state. Now, you can look under workplace, for example. So say you want to meet your supervisor to be in private practice, or you want your supervisor to work in an agency setting. Or you might prefer your supervisor work in a hospital. Those are all workplace settings that you can search by. You can also search by gender, you can search by licensure status. So there are variety of different search specialty search terms.

The other thing that’s really cool is, then you can also go in and you can it says supervisor, so you can click on supervisor, you enter a little bit of information, the disclosure agreement, and then you can purchase your directory listing. And you go right through that. And we take you through that whole process as well. The cool thing is, is even if you’re not seeking supervision, so say, Maureen, that you decide that you want to learn, you have a very complicated case. For example, say you get a client that has an eating disorder. And that’s not your area of specialty, but you do want to work–or a client that you’ve been seeing for a while, begins to manifest some symptoms of an eating disorder, and you don’t want to necessarily refer out, but you want to continue to work with this client you want to consult, you can hop on the directory, you can go for free, you can go into the directory as a supervision seeker and look for a clinician who has a specialty in eating disorders and get a consult with them. And that’s a free service for anyone seeking consultation or supervision. And as a licensed clinician, you’re permitted to do that anywhere in the United States. There’s no portability laws for those kinds of consultations. Exactly.

Maureen Werrbach

I love that I didn’t even think about the like having that be applicable to fully licensed clinicians and supervisors who might just need a case consult with someone who specializes in something.

Amy Parks

Absolutely, absolutely. So think about the advantage for group practices to be able to say, hey, you know, you can jump in and if you need to consult with a specialist, here’s that opportunity and you can search for that specialist under the directory. So for supervision seekers, and I’m not sure we’ll change the language to consultation because I think that might be a little bit muddy. We’ll have to see. You know, we’re really babies at this. So it’s going to be a learning process for us. And we’re going to take all the advice we can get. So if anyone has ideas for us, let us know. But um, you know that that’s free, that’s a totally free option, the only pay to play is your email address. So to get into it, you have to do that. But um, then the directory, there’s going to be a fee for it. You can pay by month, you can pay for the year. But here’s the next part of this–

Maureen Werrbach

I’m really excited about this part.

Amy Parks

Oh, no, Do I–Do you know what it is? The CE part?

Maureen Werrbach

Yeah.

Amy Parks

Oh, okay. I was like, Oh, my God, you know what this is? Okay. So then the next part of it that’s really, really exciting to that i’m not sure because the developer–this is sort of part two with the developer again, we’re babies at this. So I’m like winging it, man.

Maureen Werrbach

As we all do in business!

Amy Parks

I know, I don’t actually know what I’m talking about. I’m just excited. Can you tell I’m really excited? Yeah, I’m excited. You know why I’m excited Maureen? I’m excited because this is our legacy. Like, this is something that no association, no other business, no one has done for us. Yeah, no one’s done this for us. And little me and little Virginia is like, heck, someone has to do this for us. And so I’m like, I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna do this for us. Yeah, darn it. Yeah. So anyway, I might die trying.

But um, so the other really exciting thing is on the site, we’re going to offer CEs in ethics and supervision. Only in ethics and supervision, you won’t be able to get CEs and how to use essential oils, you will not be able to–sorry. You will not be able to get CEs on how to do anything other than ethics and supervision. So we all have to get ethics, there’s no way around that that’s just the way it goes. Now, there are some differences state to state, although ethics at the ACA level are pretty standard, we’re going to have to have some disclosures that say, you know, check your individual state for any kind of special language, I’m not exactly sure how that’s gonna work.

But what we’re going to do, the really exciting thing is that we have connected with some of the top supervision trainers and ethics trainers in the United States, to be faculty on our site, and they have offered trainings. And so what you would do is anyone can, they don’t have to be in the directory, they don’t have to be supervision seekers, they can be any people. They can come onto our site, they can purchase a package of one or three or six, whatever CEs, and you just kind of like buy a ticket. And you kind of like, I don’t exactly know how it works. You just buy a ticket and you take your one hour CE, and you get a certificate and you’re done.

Maureen Werrbach

Like instead of buying an actual course you essentially can buy a ticket and then use it on any course that relates to however many–

Amy Parks

Exactly.

Maureen Werrbach

I love that! And you can also like gift it to people without gifting a specific course that they might not take. You can say I’m gifting you, let’s say three or four, or however you’re going to do itAnd then that person can go in and choose what core.

Amy Parks

Yes! And so as a practice owner, you can say, I’m going to annually give you three, you know, three tickets, you can go in and you can pick. I want three classes that are given by Maureen Werrbach, or I want these three, you know, here, whatever. So what we’ll do is, we will soon will probably we’re going to rotate the classes, we’ll probably sunset some over a period of time. We would, I would absolutely invite anybody that is interested in being the faculty, it will be paid. You know how we do conferences, and nobody pays us? Yeah. Okay, that’s not happening. So all the faculty will be paid. And the fun thing is, this is fun to me, I guess, is that companies like say, Simple Practice or Brighter Vision, or, you know, these people with the big bucks that sponsor that get big bucks from us, they can come in and they can say we’ve sponsored these three, these, this series of three ethics courses taught by Maureen Werrbach. And so that’s a really nice way of companies coming in and their names being associated with different CE credits.

Maureen Werrbach

Yeah.

Amy Parks

I’m not exactly sure again, how all that works, because I’m a baby at this. But that’s sort of the vision. And so yeah, so we can gift them to people that do certain things in the in the site, sign up for different things or whatever you can give them to your staff. And they don’t have to sign up for it. They can just, they’ll just buy this ticket. It’s kind of like going to the movies. Yeah. And you get your ticket. And then you just when you redeem it, it just cancels itself out. And then you’ll get your certificate electronically after that.

Another really cool thing we think we’re going to try to do is when you are a faculty, no, no, when you are a directory member, this is something we also don’t have as, as a country, or as clinicians. There’s no standard credential for supervision. And so what we’re hoping to do–I have to coordinate this with ACES, or maybe not. You know how there’s a saying that says you can ask for permission, or you could say, apologize, right? I might just not even ask, I don’t know.

Maureen Werrbach

I’m an apologize later person too.

Amy Parks

Okay, so if ACES people are listening right now, they could call me but, um, so I may not, I may not ask for permission. But there’s no credential for supervisors, there really should be you should have a little credential that says, I’m a little credential supervisor, right? Why not? And I know there’s the ACS credential, that then I understand that I have that it makes perfect sense. But I want to state credit, I want a little credential that says I have been accredited by my state. Yeah. And so what we’re going to do I think, is is although I haven’t thought it through in terms of if you lose it, what would happen but anyway, I think we’d have to see if it was renewed annually or something but you’re going to get like a little credential badge that you can use on the site that says you know, I’m a credit an accredited supervisor by my state. So it’s not just I’m on some kind of Excel spreadsheet somewhere right?

Maureen Werrbach

You’re doing a lot!

Amy Parks

I’m excited.

Maureen Werrbach

I am so excited to see this go live. So what can what can people do now to stay in the know because obviously this is coming out a little bit before it actually goes live. Is there any way that this gets prepared so that when it does go live they’re aware?

Amy Parks

They can do one of three things or all three of them. So they can go to the landing page which is clinical supervision directory dot com which is a long spelling. The future–when when we build the website out this the help page is going to be, the help the email address is going to be help me at the-CSD.com So it’ll be the hyphen CSD dot com, so no one actually has to spell clinical supervision directory ever again. Yeah, but for now, that’s what it is. So it’s the hyphen CSD dot com. It’ll be help me I was like, What? How can I make it super easy for people to ask for help? Yeah, help me? Yep. Perfect, right. So they can go to the clinical supervision directory dot com, which is our landing page and tells them lots of information, lots of as to your qs and other stuff like that. They can follow us on Instagram, which is clin supervision directory. Or they can go to find your supervisor on Insta on Facebook. Oh, yeah. So lots of different ways to find us. And we’re gonna keep doing our best to, um, to put ourselves in groups. We’re going to be on a lot of podcasts coming up, we’re going to be talking about it as much as we can with with people as often as we can. And, you know, just sharing the information.

Maureen Werrbach

I have one last question. I wasn’t gonna ask the question. And then I thought of this. So I know I kind of just I usually end with how can people find you, but I’m going to end with this question since you’re a group practice owner, too. I was thinking, how this could potentially be beneficial for group practice owners looking for provisionally licensed people for employment in terms of or for people who are provisionally licensed, who are looking? Because we get this a lot where they’re seeking employment, and someone who can supervise them for hours so that they can become fully licensed. Do you see that being? I’m like, obviously, I’m on the back end here and haven’t seen it. But is that something that could also be beneficial is someone who’s looking to get supervision but also looking for a home that they can work at and get that supervision?

Amy Parks

Yeah, so I was actually talking to someone about this recently, and I’m not exactly sure how we could make that work in terms of like, ad space, etc. But I do think if you have a directory listing for supervisors in your practice, there’s nothing that would prohibit that directory listing just from saying something like, you know, our practice is always looking for, you know, to bring on qualified supervisees. You know, to work in our practice or some language around that in their bio, there would be nothing to prohibit that. Certainly, I can think through that a little bit further and see if there’s some kind of way that there’s like, you could pick you know, our practice hires, that could be, that could be a button Exactly. I’m literally doing today like the buttons for the developer. So I can add that as a button that just says like our practice hires, yeah, provisually licensed or like supervised supervision. I have to make the language the same. So

Maureen Werrbach

And you have to figure that out. But I was thinking I mean, you know, this as a group practice owner, people are group owners are struggling to find people and I know, you know, there’s a good amount of group practice owners who do bring on provisionally licensed, they’re a teaching practice, where there might be people seeking a supervisor and a place to work with their supervisor. I think that’d be great.

Amy Parks

So it could be like my workplace hires. Yeah, yep. Yep.

Maureen Werrbach

Love that.

Amy Parks

See this is what we do all the time. We just talk and fix and talk and fix.

Maureen Werrbach

We refine. I feel like that’s the the life of business is constantly refining and fine tuning until it’s at a place that is perfect. And then it becomes imperfect after a while, and then you–

Amy Parks

Right, it becomes imperfect the next day! Thank you so much for talking about this morning, and I’m really excited to have it get into the worl!

Maureen Werrbach

I am too. And for anyone who’s listening, I will be putting in the show notes, the link to all the ways that you can, you know, get in contact with them and be in the know for when it goes live. Because I see this being really valuable. And it sounds like you guys have done so much research in terms of like the state by state requirements. That’s like, worth so much. I think it’s gonna be such a great thing once it goes out there. So I’m excited for you. Yeah, we’re excited to it’s gonna be fun. Yeah, well, it’s good seeing you.

Amy Parks

Good seeing you too. Thanks so much. Yeah. Bye. Bye.