Kansas psychology advisory committee opens fact-finding on postdoctoral requirement

The Licensed Psychology Advisory Committee discussed a proposal from the Kansas Psychological Association to allow additional predoctoral supervised hours to count toward Kansas’s two-year supervised experience requirement for licensure.

Executive Director David Fye summarized the origin of the proposal: a KPA representative asked the advisory committee to research whether the state should permit earlier accrual of supervised hours so some predoctoral (practicum) experience could count toward the supervised-experience requirement. Fye said the committee had previously discussed the topic and that the proposal did not seek elimination of the postdoctoral year but greater flexibility in how hours are counted.

Committee members expressed divergent views. Edward Hunter (Ned) and other members raised concerns that practicum and postdoctoral experiences are not equivalent developmentally and that allowing broader predoc credit could reduce the depth of supervised postdoctoral training. Hunter said the change “would be awfully hard on people in their postdoctoral experience if they can also meet the same requirement by getting it in a predoctoral way.” Several members urged additional information about whether states that allow predoc credit have higher licensure rates, whether complaint rates changed, and how other states define and audit practicum versus internship and postdoc hours.

Leslie Allen, the board’s assistant director and licensing manager, summarized outstanding technical questions: appropriate supervision-to-client-contact ratios, what practicum/internship elements should be required, whether a doctoral-year practicum should count if the candidate already holds a psychology master’s degree, and whether extra internship hours should be transferable toward the remaining supervised hours. She noted the advisory committee had not yet produced a comparative grid of other states’ rules and offered to prepare further materials if requested.

The committee agreed to collect specific questions and ask KPA to provide data and analysis. Chair Richard Nobles asked members to send questions to staff; staff will consolidate committee inquiries and forward them to KPA for response. No formal change to rules or regulations was made; staff and committee members will use the follow-up information to decide whether to prepare a formal recommendation to the board.