Certification of Psych Evaluators by January 1st

By January 1st, forensic psychologists and psychiatrists in Oregon need to be certified in order to handle GEI or aid and assist (aka criminal responsibility) evaluations.  The mechanism for creating this requirement arises from HB 3100, passed in the last session.  That’s the same bill that tries to move low level offenders out of the State Hospital when they’ve been found either guilty except insane or unfit to proceed.  Regarding certification, the bill requires that a court must use a certified evaluator when appointing someone to perform an aid and assist evaluation or when accepting a GEI evaluation.  The certification process itself is left to the Oregon Health Authority.  The OHA has a rule making committee that has been meeting for the last few months to develop the certification process. The basic process is this, a psychologist or psychiatrist may submit an application to be certified (see below).  There are four levels of certification:

Full certification means that an evaluator would have the ability to practice exactly as they do now with the freedom to handle any kind of case.  Those evaluators who went through a forensic internship will automatically receive full certification.  Everyone else will have to submit an application along with three de-identified evaluations they’ve written.  The idea is that a good, experienced evaluator will immediately receive full certification.  And those who are newer or who need additional training will receive provisional certification.

Provisional certification is for those evaluators who don’t automatically qualify for full certification.  Some of those folks will be immediately given full certification whenever the processing occurs.  Others will be “supervised”, ”mentored” or “trained” for some period of time.  Nobody is quite sure what form that supervision or training will take at this point.  A provisionally certified evaluator may handle any kind of evaluation except GEI evaluations on Measure 11 cases.  If an evaluator is so new that he or she doesn’t have any evaluations to submit then the evaluator may perform evaluations on misdemeanor cases in order to build up the requisite 3 evaluations.

Conditional certification is for exigent circumstances like out of state evaluators or those with a niche specialty who aren’t eligible for full or provisional certification.  Conditional certification would end at the disposition of the case for which certification is granted.

Temporary certification is what is being used to get applicants past the training requirements.  The OHA can’t very well require a training if there isn’t a training to attend.  There will be a RFP for someone to handle the training.  But I don’t think the RFP has been sent out.  Much less the training set up.  So that requirement is essentially waived until the point in time where it can be set up.  Update:  Additionally, all evaluators will be granted temporary full certification until June 30, enough time for the review process to be implemented.

There has been some justifiable concern from those evaluators who don’t automatically qualify for full certification that the bureaucratic process will force them into provisional status (and preclude them from handling M11 GEI evals) for the period of time it takes to set up the peer review panel that will review applications and evaluations.  At the last rulemaking committee on December 8th, the problem was solved by extending temporary certification to include the delay created by implementing the application review process.  More specifically, anyone who applies will receive full certification until June 30, a date that is presumably past the time it will take to implement the review process.  Whether that process takes 2 weeks or 6 months won’t matter nearly so much if we haven’t forced a bunch of good evaluators out of the system on Measure 11 cases.

Here are the relevant documents at this point in time (as I referred to in the previous paragraph, the rules may be altered at the December 8th meeting):

• House Bill 3100
• The administrative rule (OAR) for certification as it now stands
• The Oregon Health Authority overview as it now stands
• The evaluator application
• The psychologist supplement to the application
• The psychiatrist supplement to the application
• The Oregon Health Authority web page set up to accept applications

In addition to applications, the certification process will also involve trainings, standardized expectations for evaluations and, ideally, mentorship for newer evaluators.  All of those pieces are still up in the air and somewhat dependent on funding.  But it is because of those extra components that I am hopeful that sub-standard evaluations can be improved statewide without causing a diminution of good evaluators.  I have always been particularly concerned about the availability of good evaluators, particularly on the east side of the mountains where any evaluator is sometimes hard to find.  In order to make sure we don’t lose good evaluators to the bureaucratic process, we all need to help get the word out.  You see, there’s no list of statewide evaluators.  That’s one of the things that certification will accomplish.  That means that we all need to make sure that the evaluators we use know that they have to submit an application before January 1st.  If an evaluator doesn’t know about the requirement, he or she can’t submit an application.  Therein lies the biggest danger in this process.  OPDS, OCDLA and other organizations will help get the word out.  But as I’ve said, we need help from all of you.