Empowering Clinicians Navigating the Complex World of Clinical Supervision, Consultation, and Keeping Clinicians and Their Clients Safe – with Dr. Amy Parks

Ongoing education is critical to building a thriving practice and career as a health professional. But what are the challenges facing both health professionals and the profession as a whole now and into the future? That’s the topic of this conversation when Jo is joined by Dr Amy Parks.

Dr Parks has 30 years of experience working with children, adolescents and families as both an educator and psychologist.  Dr. Parks has a Doctorate in Educational Psychology with a specialty in developmental neuroscience. She is a Child & Adolescent Psychologist as well as the founder and Clinical Director of WISE Mind Solutions LLC and The Wise Family Counseling, Assessment & Parent Coaching in Virginia.  She is also the founder of the Clinical Supervision Directory – a connection super-highway for supervision-seekers working towards licensure in counselling and social work across the US. 

You can find out more about the Clinical Supervision Directory by visiting https://clinicalsupervisiondirectory.com

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Future-Proofing Health Professionals Symposium 2023
• Future Proofing Health Professional Facebook group 

If you know you need more support, please visit my website at https://jomuirhead.com

Transcript

Jo:

Welcome everybody back to another episode of the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast. And today we are going to be speaking into the very exciting topic of education. Now, before all of you shut your ears off and went, oh my God, it’s gonna be so dry and dull and boring, I’ve already got my qualifications. Why do we need to talk about education? Please pay attention because this affects you. So today’s episode, I am joined by the fabulous, wonderful, and incredibly smart Dr. Amy Parks. She’s making herself available from Virginia all the way on the other side of the planet, for us to have a very real and raw conversation about education throughout our career as health professionals. So, Amy, who are you? What do you do? And why is this topic important to you?

Amy:

Awesome. Thank you for having me, Jo. Yes, it is the other side of the planet. It is seven o’clock at night for me and bright and early in the morning for you. So it’s really fun to be with you. Thank you so much for having me. I actually think for me, education is the most exciting topic to be talking about. So if your alert listeners are bored and droopy eyed about it, then I am surprised because for me, it’s my favourite topic. I’ve been in the education field for my entire career since I started. What I have done as a professional since I graduated from undergrad. And I’m a lifelong learner and I do think that everyone should be a lifelong learner in whatever capacity that that means, whatever that means for them. It might be professional, it might be learning how to make black beans for dinner. It might mean learning mindfulness or adding a gratitude practice or getting your PhD or whatever it might mean. But education should never, ever stop. And in fact, it used to be that we thought our brains were not malleable and we didn’t really grow in our brains. But what we’ve learned is that our brains are completely elastic. And the more we learn and the more we grow, the more our brains continue to expand and grow and keep us young. So we want that and we need that. So we’re gonna keep learning

Jo:

<Laugh>. Okay, there we go. Brain health. You’ve managed to incorporate your passion for brains and brain health and neuroscience and education. Beautifully there, Amy. That’s wonderful. So you’ve had some roles as an educator in your career. Can you explain to us what they have been?

Amy:

Yeah, so I didn’t tell you who I am, so let me tell you who I am. Okay. So let’s see. I started my career as a teacher. That’s their education thing. And then I became a school psychologist and a school counsellor. So I worked in schools still, but in the mental health capacity. And then I left that to become a private practitioner and started a group practice. And so throughout my career I’ve sort of stumbled on things that I just felt like needed to happen or needed to change, or needed to be a part of a movement or something that was bothering me or troubling me. And I kind of needed to sort of chew on it and do something with it and move it in a direction.

And that kind of happened with teaching and then the mental health aspect of it. And then leaving the education system because it was such a difficult system to work within. And then going into the mental health field in private practice. And then I wasn’t enough. I needed to sort of duplicate or replicate myself and did a group practice. And I’m still in group practice. I work as an owner of a group practice here in Virginia. And then I also discovered that we were as a country, the United States and this may very well be true in other states throughout the world, but I know in the United States we are doing a pretty lacklustre job of educating, we’re educating well, but moving our educated counsellors and therapists and social workers into their profession through the supervision process. And so I started a membership directory for moving them faster into the licensure process so that we could get them seeing clients so that we could be improving the mental health service delivery for our communities. So, so that’s sort of the trajectory of things. And at the core of all of that is the delivery of education in a way that is sort of more efficient but still professional and well done and at the highest calibre.

Jo:

Wow. So nothing like being ambitious. <Laugh>, we’re just gonna change the face of the mental health. We’re gonna change the mental health of the United States through providing quality education that allows unlicensed clinicians to move through the licensure faster and connect them with people who need services.

Amy:

Yeah. I mean, the goal is to find supervision faster. And so that’s one of the goals and of what I’m doing now. And all along, I think in education, and I’m sure this is true in Australia, and again for all of your international listeners, the idea is we don’t necessarily need to get people educated faster, but we need to get people educated well, and in a way that helps them move to their next thing. And inspires them to get to their next thing, not to languish and just sort of be a lump, but to get to their next inspirational moments.

Jo:

Yeah. I love <laugh>. Yes. So this is where the concept of being a lifelong learner is, and my own experience working into the United States, and particularly with mental health professionals, I’m still am quite stunned, shocked, somewhat disappointed that a lot of mental health professionals, ’cause I dunno what it’s like for other disciplines, but they spend so much time, energy, and effort getting through that supervision process and that licensure process. And I know it’s arduous. Like I’m not diminishing that for a minute but then there’s no energy effort left. And so they just spend the next years just sort of almost coasting through what CEUs do I need to get. And the question we see so often is where my registration is due, where can I find cheap, free CEUs? And the more I see that, the more horrified because we’re actually not serving ourselves, our professions or our community, if that’s our attitude.

And I’m using the US as an example ’cause I’m talking to you, but it happens here too, so it’s almost as if we forgot or weren’t informed that if you are going to take on this profession, one of the ongoing commitments you were making is to your own professional development. Would that be correct? Yeah. She’s nodding away.

Amy:

Absolutely.

Jo:

So explain to me a little bit about the pressure in the United States for supervisees and supervisors. Like why is this difficult?

Amy:

Well, one of the challenges is that, and I wanted to sort of just touch real quickly on what you were saying about education and in fact, you know, I really hadn’t actually thought about it the way you’re putting it out. It didn’t really even occur to me that yeah, people have spent so much time getting licensed that they’re almost exhausted. It’s funny ’cause I don’t feel that way. But I’m also unique in that I just want all the training, but, you know, I do hear that, I know that people feel that way and I just had not really put two and two together on that. And that’s really interesting. You know, the challenge for people that are getting licensed, our biggest challenge in the United States, and it’s funny because I talk to people in other countries and it’s just not even a thing.

We have created so many silos in the United States because we are not the United States. We are the ununited states. Ununited? Disunited. We’re like the Disunited states. We have 51 silos, not 51, 50 plus one States. We do not have any unity at all around this particular issue. And so or really any issue, I can’t think of any issue <laugh>, we are united around. But this particular issue is particularly difficult because there are, for example, so there are several mental health professions. There’s counselling, social work, psychology, marriage and family therapists. There are a lot of different licensure areas and each of those licensure areas have different requirements.

And they all have different types of supervision requirements. They all have different fees. They all have different university requirements, different supervision, different fees, different titles in every different state. So it’s just exponentially complex. And so that complexity in and of itself is difficult when you think about things like moving from state to state. Or living in states that are in very close proximity. So I live in Virginia in the area that is called the DMV, which is Maryland, Virginia, and DC and it’s this area where I could literally practically throw a rock and hit the District of Columbia and throw another rock and hit Maryland because I’m just right on the border of those two areas. DC is not a state yet, but basically it counts as a state and Maryland. And I could have clients from all three of those at any time because it’s two miles to drive to us but I can’t be licensed in those states without applying for those that licensure. So, and it’s a different exam for me to be licensed in those two States plus a fee, plus a jurisprudence exam on the laws of those states. And it’s so ridiculous.

Jo:

You have to do that three times!

Amy:

Three different times. It’s a totally different exam.

Jo:

There’s no such thing as recognition of prior learning!

Amy:

<Laugh>. Right. And here’s the thing, I have a doctorate now. I mean, not that that makes me super, super smart over somebody else, but you’re talking about young graduates from grad school who don’t even know what they’re looking for. I do this for a living, knowing what I’m looking for. So I know what I’m looking for when I’m looking at a board site, a board of counselling’s website, grad students don’t know that. So a lot of them don’t. So that’s, it’s just so complicated. It’s so, so complicated.

Jo:

So for those of us who aren’t in the United States, and like me in Australia, I can practise anywhere in Australia. There is no state-based rule that says I can’t. So I have clients nationally, my practice has clients nationally. I can’t imagine what it would be like to only be able to find clients in the state within which I live, keeping in mind that the population of Australia is less than the population of California. But still, it seems incredibly disjointed and unhelpful. But there’s a whole heap of conversation about that. So two of the difficulties that we’ve turned up today about ongoing education is that by the time you graduate and are licensed and are allowed to practise, you’ve already been through a very, very rigorous process. It’s incredibly rigorous. And then you’re kind of let loose onto your clients and you probably just scrambling to try and make ends meet, right? Because we know that wages are not big for health professionals which feeds into this. So is it any wonder that we get to the financial year or year that we have to resubmit and kind of go, oh my God, I need cheap and free CEUs. To me that makes perfect sense that we’ve got that attitude, right?

Amy:

Right. Especially in circumstances where clinicians are working in agencies where they’re working and seeing 40 clients a week at agency or insurance rate wages, which is often $35 an hour and they have student loans to pay back. And so there are a lot of interesting and problematic issues with mental health parity. You know, it’s interesting too. I actually spent the weekend with a friend of mine who’s a delegate from the United States to the Philippines. And, you know, the United States actually is doing pretty good compared to a lot of other countries too. Like in the Philippines, mental health workers, the people that are serving mental health care needs in the Philippines, it’s not even recognized as a profession. So I guess I have to say, you know, we’re pretty lucky in that regard and yet it’s still very, very problematic.

So there’s are a lot of really big challenges and one of the things I want to want people to be aware of is that when there are so many hoops to jump through in any profession and I’m concerned that there’s enormous hardship going into a really difficult field or going into a field where they are extremely challenged in the work in and of itself. So providing mental health care. But also being burdened themselves by the financial burdens, their own mental health challenges, the countertransference and transference is involved in the work, the burdens of a long day and low wages, like they’re just gonna quit <laugh>.

Jo:

Exactly. Yeah.

Amy:

And so when we talk about the future of healthcare professionals, we’re not gonna have them. They’re just gonna burn out so fast or they’re not gonna enter it at all. Absolutely. And I don’t actually know what the numbers are, but I will be pulling those numbers before we start talking more about this in our summit in the next couple weeks, because this is really critical to know what these numbers are going in, what are the healthcare professional numbers as we go into the next decade or the next even five years. Yeah. What do those enrollment numbers look like? Because they can’t be good.

Jo:

Well, well, they’re not <laugh>.

Amy:

A whole lot easier, Jo, to be a makeup TikTok influencer.

Jo:

Oh hells, yes.

Amy:

Than to go to become an OT.

Jo:

Yeah. Absolutely. You are preaching to the converted. Now, I’m glad you said it so succinctly. And I’ve had this conversation with my son and he’s 23, 24, and I always wanted him to become an OT. He doesn’t necessarily wanna do that. But then he says this quite blanketly to me, why would I mum? You guys all you talk about is how burned out you are. Right? And then I look at the salaries and go, hells no, I can make more money day trading than that. Right? And I’m like, wow. Right. And so then I still that my concern is, and you know this because you’ve known me for a long time, is that I don’t wanna get into my seventies and my eighties needing quality health professionals. And all the only options I’ve got are the burned out, disengaged, uneducated, talking about theories from the 1950s person, or someone who is a new graduate who hasn’t got a clue and hope to God they don’t make a mistake. So my passion is helping people and no amount of AI is gonna fix this. So if you’re all worried that AI is gonna take our job, it can’t, it just can’t.

Amy:

<Laugh> Same with teachers. We have the same challenge as teachers. Same challenge with teachers. My daughter-in-law is a teacher in a very, very high needs school in Georgia. She gets paid $8 an hour.

Jo:

Is that less than McDonald’s?

Amy:

I don’t even know that’s possible. SoI just don’t even understand it. I don’t understand it <laugh>. And I’m like, how are you doing that? I’m sure that there’s gotta be some problem with that, and they’re looking into that, but I just don’t understand. Yeah. How can people even function?

Jo:

Yeah. We know what’s gonna happen if we don’t change, basically I’m gonna get sick and not gonna get care. And Jo’s worried about that <laugh>.

Amy:

So I can speak into what’s next, like what to do?

Jo:

Yeah, please go for it.

Amy:

So yeah. So in the mental healthcare field in the United States, my personal professional contribution is to ensure through the creation of the clinical supervision directory, that the next generation of healthcare professionals in mental healthcare professionals have access to the best supervisors, the best supervisors in the United States, immediately upon graduation with no barrier to entry. Meaning they don’t have to do anything other than to go to one stop shop. It’s like Tinder for supervision without dating. They just put in their state and find a supervisor. And then the upshot of that, the bonus to that is that those supervisors have a place where they can call their own, where they can connect with one another in community and say, what do we need to do collectively as a supervision collective to make sure that we sustain ourselves so that we stay on in the ready, we stay ready and willing to be able to be the people that mentor this next generation so we can hold this legacy. And that’s it. That’s what I’m doing.

Jo:

Yeah. It’s an incredible piece of work. And I’ve been in and out and around and looked all over. It’s so easy to navigate, it’s so easy to find. And you’ve taken the time and the effort and the energy to actually work out the requirements for all 51 states.

Amy:

50 plus one. We are not allowed to call DC a State <laugh>.

Jo:

Okay.

Amy:

But they want to be!

Jo:

Okay, you’re 50 plus one. Oh my God. So for me, in Australia as a rehabilitation counsellor, I have two associations trying to work out. The difference between those two was a headache. So I cannot begin to imagine what it’s like that you’ve done that for multiple mental health professionals. So it’s not just like you’re all under the one blanket. You’ve got all those different credentialing bodies in all those different states. That’s a huge piece of work.

So where do people go to find it? If we’ve got people listening who go, hell, I need to be a part of this. I wanna supervise, I just wanna be a part of it. The newsletters are awesome by the way, people. You wanna be in it for the newsletter. Where do they go? How do people find it?

Amy:

So yeah, so we try to make sure we’re sharing good industry information. So the easiest way to go is to the-csd.com.  That’s the easiest way to go ’cause everyone always misspells clinical. So the- csd.com. And you know what our goal is to get every supervisor in the country to be in the-csd.com in the clinical supervision directory. That’s our goal. And we’re determined to get there. We’re fishing in the Atlantic Ocean, but we’re working hard to do it. So that’s really what we’re working on.

Jo:

That’s great. So for those of you who are listening today there will be show notes as always. So you can come back and find them. Or you could come and join Amy and I over in the Future Proofing Health Professionals Facebook group, where you will meet Amy, you will learn more about the CSD. Amy is also contributing in a couple of different ways to the Symposium. Tell us about that, Amy, tell us about what you’re doing.

Amy:

So yeah, so I’m going to be the kickoff speaker for the Future Proofing Health Professional Symposium. So it’s gonna be so rocking good. I can’t even wait. I am so excited. So I’m the kickoff speaker, so that’s gonna be really exciting. The Clinical Supervision directory is a huge supporter of the event. We’re going to be offering a discount code to any supervisors that wanna join that are part of our event. Our part of your event. And the CDD is happily helping out. And so we’re gonna be doing that for, for any people that wanna be a part of it. We’re gonna be having lots of conversations in your Facebook group for anybody that wants to talk about supervision. And we are actually launching our own podcast as well. So we’d love to talk about supervisors and two supervisors. It’s coming out in September called Supervision Simplified.

Jo:

Oh, very nice. And also fun. At the risk of getting this wrong, the CSD is providing CEUs, right? For some of the mental health professionals, <laugh>, who don’t wanna participate and get that added bonus as well. I had to be so careful about that language.

Amy:

<Laugh>. That’s right. Exactly. So we will be connecting you with that information via the ticket website for the event.

Jo:

Right. Amy, the next time we get to hang out together in real life in the same place and we’re going to a cafe, what are you ordering?

Amy:

So I have a very simple coffee order. I’m familiar with this question that you ask on your podcast. I have a very simple coffee order, but I do have very specific needs. So I order just a plain coffee, but I like heavy cream. So I just have a splash of heavy cream, but I gave up sweetener in 2020, so I need no sweetener.

Jo:

Okay.

Amy:

It’s pretty simple. I do not have a complicated coffee order. I love all the coffee. I can drink almost anything, but that’s just my classic, very simple.

Jo:

Oh, I love it. I really, really like it. Amy, this has been such a fantastic conversation. It has gone very fast. So I am looking forward to this conversation continuing in the symposium because I’ve heard you speak and I know you’re gonna bring a very powerful, impactful, inspiring session. So I’m kind of glad that I get to be there to introduce you. So this is the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast, and we look forward to be able to bring you more of these great conversations. Until next episode, go be your awesome self.

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