Regulations for Clinical Supervision in Social Work

Background and Purpose: It is essential to regulate clinical supervision to ensure the delivery of quality care and to protect clients and the public. The lack of oversight and objective evaluation of supervisors’ performance, which is essential for the development of supervisees’ clinical competence, remains a key concern in regulating clinical supervision. This study aims to review national guidelines and best practice standards for how state boards should regulate clinical supervision in social work. It also aims to examine variations in state rules regarding clinical supervision regulations and categorize states by the strength of their regulation of clinical supervision.

Methods: The first data source for this study was the clinical supervision rules outlined in each state’s social work statute, available on the ASWB website. The second data source was the state-of-residence data of 25,088 clinical license applicants who took the exam at least once in 2022, provided by ASWB. The third and last data source was state social work statutes and the websites of state regulatory boards. This study adopted an exploratory approach to analyze the supervision rules, which were merged with data from clinical license applicants. The descriptive analysis of the merged data aimed to (1) identify states that lack regulatory rules across the regulatory domains of clinical supervision and estimate the share of clinical license applicants affected by such lack of regulatory rules and (2) categorize states by the strength of their regulation of clinical supervision.

Results: This study identified four regulatory domains of clinical supervision: (1) supervisor qualifications, (2) supervision plans, (3) documentation and reporting, and (4) timeframe and hours, and discussed the national guidelines outlined for each regulatory domain. It also found that social work statutes in seven states in the Midwest and New England regions – Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island – have weaker regulation of clinical supervision, lacking rules in all or three of the four regulatory domains, affecting nearly 21% of clinical license applicants. On the other hand, Kansas, Mississippi, and 21 other states were found to have stronger regulations regarding clinical supervision. Their social work statutes had all or some rules in all four regulatory domains, closely following the national guidelines established by the Model Social Work Practice Act and the Best Practice Standards. Approximately 24% of license applicants nationwide lived in states with stronger regulation of clinical supervision.

Conclusions and Implications: State governments have the authority and responsibility to ensure minimum standards in clinical supervision, and regulatory boards and social work statutes serve as the mechanisms to achieve this goal. The absence of regulatory rules in certain states suggests, at the very least, that minimum standards are inconsistent across the country. The findings also suggest that further research is necessary to investigate how the absence of regulatory rules affects the quality of clinical supervision, the clinical workforce, and public safety measures.