Advisory committee weighs safety training for practitioners and whether it should count for CE credit
Summary
Members discussed options to improve practitioner safety education (de‑escalation, client safety, duty to warn) and recommended revisiting the continuing education regulation to allow qualifying safety trainings to count toward required CE rather than imposing a new mandatory hour requirement.
Advisory committee members discussed safety training options for practitioners and whether such training should be mandated or incentivized through continuing education credit. The topic was introduced after members reported instances where practitioners have faced safety risks in community or clinical settings.
Several members said they favor making safety training accessible and countable toward CE rather than imposing a new statutory requirement. One member suggested that the existing continuing education regulation (K.A.R. 102‑5‑10) contains a list of activities that are not acceptable for CE credit (for example, basic first aid or employer‑specific in‑service training) and recommended revisiting that language to explicitly allow appropriate safety and de‑escalation courses to qualify.
Fye said enforcement of new CE mandates is politically challenging at present and cited recent legislative attention to workforce issues; he recommended incentivizing training and clarifying which programs meet CE standards. Members proposed linking safety content to ethics, client confidentiality, duty‑to‑warn topics, or trauma‑informed practice to make it count toward existing CE categories.
What’s next: committee members asked staff to revisit K.A.R. 102‑5‑10 and to consider whether safety trainings could be explicitly eligible for CE credit or spotlighted in BSRB communications and optional jurisprudence webinars.
