Social Work Interstate Licensure Compacts: Rationales, Expected Effects, and a Future Research Agenda

Background and Purpose: The social work interstate licensure compact is underway to improve social workers’ practice mobility physically and virtually. The compact’s model legislation has been finalized, and when seven jurisdictions enact it into their laws, the compact will officially take effect and enable social workers in the member jurisdictions to practice with a multistate license. With this background, the overall purpose of this review study is to provide social workers with the conceptual, policy, and empirical understandings of the licensure compact. More specifically, this paper provides a literature review on the limitations of the current state-based licensure system for social worker practitioners, clients, and regulators that calls for an interstate licensure compact. It also reviews the models of interstate compacts from other healthcare professions and draws lessons critical for the implementation of the emerging Social Work Interstate Licensure Compact. It further reviews empirical evidence on interstate compacts, scarcely available only in the nursing literature. Finally, it plans to propose a future research agenda related to the social work licensure compact and practice mobility.

Methods: This paper provides a comprehensive review of the literature in social work and other healthcare professions relevant to the issues of practice mobility and interstate licensure compacts. The review focuses on both conceptual understandings of the related issues and empirical evidence on the effects of an existing licensure compact in the healthcare professions.

Results: The review results are that the current licensure system has three-pronged challenges for practitioners, the public, and regulators related to jurisdictional boundaries and practice mobility. For practitioners, the current licensure system’s interstate variations present challenges for practitioners who wish to practice in multiple states, either in-person or virtually. The challenges are greater for those with minority backgrounds and with military partners who move more often than civilians. For the public, by impeding practitioners’ interstate practice mobility, the challenges also contribute to reducing public access to social work services in a time of increasing need. For social work regulators, state variations in regulatory rules and practices make it difficult for them to regulate social work practice, which can potentially pose threats to public health and safety. Many healthcare professions – physicians, nurses, psychologists, physical therapists - created interstate licensure compacts to allow their practitioners to serve clients in multiple jurisdictions using either a mutual recognition model or an expedited licensure model. A review of the extant empirical literature on other professional compacts indicates that a compact may be related to improvement in practitioners’ geographic mobility and public safety, but it can also be associated with a reduction in their wages and employment.

Conclusions and Implications: Building upon these reviews, this paper proposes that social work stakeholders and scholars should focus on monitoring how and to what extent the emerging social work compact will affect (1) practitioners’ practice mobility and labor market outcomes, (2) public safety and access to social work services, and (3) regulatory efficiency and standardization in the future.