Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses

106 Why Liability Insurance for Therapists is Essential: Avoiding Common Pitfalls in Supervision and Practice

• Dr. Kate Walker Ph.D., LPC/LMFT Supervisor • Season 3 • Episode 106

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Speaker 1:

Hey, it's Dr Kate Walker, with your Tuesday coaching for Step it Up members. If you're listening to me on a replay, watching me on a replay, awesome for you, because you're doing something amazing right in the middle of your day or in the middle of the supermarket, or maybe you're on the treadmill, who knows? You do you, but I'm glad you're here. In fact, this is actually a pre-recorded training, so even Step it Up members are getting the YouTube link today, so my apologies for that. As of today, this is the day I'm recording. I'm actually in Ireland with my husband, so it's super cool. So who knows what day it will be, though, when you actually get to watch? So this episode is the October Scary Stories episodes. I love this time of year. I love the spookiness, I love the fallness of it. Now, in Central Texas, we may or may not get a respite from the heat, but it's fine, it's great. I'm looking outside, it's beautiful sunny day, it is not too hot out, so, yay, this episode is Scary Stories about the board. Now, if you are just joining me and you are like dying to hear some juicy complaint stuff, you're going to be disappointed.

Speaker 1:

The deal is the board's honestly been doing really, really well In Texas a couple of years ago. We had some big changes, we had some consolidations, we had some consolidations. We had a lot of things change and it's for the better. So a lot of the problems that I would have talked about five or six years ago really scary stories like waiting three years to have a complaint heard and then it's just thrown out. So you just kind of had three years of your life totally stressed out and taken away, only to find out everything's fine, which is great news. But that type of backlog, with things not being investigated for years, was typical a few years ago. I mean, it wasn't the board's fault. They were underfunded and, like many, many, many agencies, you know you can't do your job if you only have three people and they're handling four boards right. So psychology, social work, lpc, lmft it was a lot of work. Well, fast forward. We have a great board and they have solved many, many problems that we used to see.

Speaker 1:

But I will be talking about a few things that were brought up this morning. We have our Texas Supervisor Coalition Monthly Workshop that folks can attend anybody can attend and our speaker this morning was the amazing Kenda Dalrymple from Austin, texas. She's an attorney and she has worked with our boards for a long, long time Austin, texas. She's an attorney and she has worked with our boards for a long, long time and she always has such an amazing presentation. So I will be talking about a couple of things she mentioned to us so that at the end you'll have an idea, of course, what to avoid, but also a couple of ways to make your practice a whole lot better.

Speaker 1:

This won't be a terribly long episode so, like I said, I just didn't have a whole lot of negative stuff to report. I think you guys are doing great. So here I go. So one scary story and I could have saved this for the supervisor scary stories episode, but I want to talk about it now because I have seen this before, back when I was the liaison to the Texas LPC board as a part of TASES.

Speaker 1:

You know the complaints we would see when those complaints hearings were open. It wasn't uncommon to see, I should say, when an associate was just in over their head, and so that is still an issue. You know, if you take the Kate Walker training 40 hour training to become an LPC or LMFT supervisor in Texas, I talk about the developmental model again and again and again. I hit you over the head with the developmental model. Right, we can only expect our level ones to be level ones until they exhibit level two behavior that we have measured through an assessment, right? So we are monitoring our supervisees so that we know when they are ready for those difficult cases.

Speaker 1:

And so for those of you who say, own a practice that works with these specialized, complex cases and you're like but Kate, I want to bring on associates, well, you can train them though, right, make sure that they're trained, have some sort of a procedure so that when they finally see that complex case, they're ready. Right, because that is one of the scary stories that Kenda talked about with us this morning are associates who are put in situations with attorneys on the stand or in a deposition, or with families with high conflict families, and they are just in over their head, and then a complaint gets filed. You know, they didn't know how to do the paperwork, they didn't know what to do, how to do the treatment plan. So that's, I won't say as simply as that's so fixable. But y'all, I mean, if you just take the time when you bring on your associate, to make sure that they're trained properly before they take on those heavy duty cases. You can save yourself a lot of headache later and if you're an associate listening to me, I want you to think about that, right. If you get this amazing job opportunity in a spot that has the diagnosis you've been dying to work with, but then you get there and there's no training protocol or they're like here's your clipboard and your pen, have a great day. Think about that, really. Think hard about that and make sure you go to your supervisor and be honest with them. If you feel like you need a little bit extra training, right. This can only come back and bite you if things go south, all right.

Speaker 1:

Next thing Kenda talked about were unwritten rules. All right, you hear me talk a lot about. Okay, if there's no rule, we defer to best practices. All right, you hear me talk a lot about okay, if there's no rule, we defer to best practices. Best practices come from our professional organizations or they come from research, and you know, anecdotally even, what we hear in consultation groups, like the things that we kind of take for granted, like did you know that supervision contracts are not required in the rules? I mean, we teach it. In fact, that's one of the things the Kate Walker Online 40-hour training is known for.

Speaker 1:

Right, you will leave my supervisor training with a working contract, not just a template that you go home and fill out yourself. It will be corrected by a grader, there will be feedback. It is a working document when you leave my course. Yeah, rules don't require that. So it's like did you realize that? Well, as Kenda mentioned this morning, though, if you get in trouble and they go through your supervision file and they don't see that non-state paperwork right, because there is, of course, state paperwork that you must fill out and fill it, you know, turn in, but that contract is best practices and they will notice in a negative way if you somehow appear before them for a complaint and they go through the file and there's no supervision contract. So that's what Kenda referred to as an unwritten rule. You got to do it, even even though in the rules it doesn't necessarily specify that the idea of how long to keep supervisee notes. Now, a few years ago don't know how many they specified how long to keep supervisee notes. Well, that's no longer in LPC, lmft and, I'm pretty sure, social work. So how long do you keep them? Well, unwritten rule is the same amount of time that you must keep your client records and as of this recording, that's seven years or five years past the age of majority, right, age 18. So, hanging onto those supervision notes, making sure your supervisees leave with a copy of their note unwritten rule, right, nowhere does it say they have to have a copy. But that's best practices, making sure that your supervisee has a copy.

Speaker 1:

Another sort of, I guess, scary story is the idea of being grandfathered in when CEs are changed. Yeah, that's not a thing. So we had some pretty major overhauls for LPC in 2024, or that became effective January 1st 2024. And everybody was like oh no, I don't, I can't comply, what do I do? Maybe they'll grandfather me in? Nope, doesn't work like that the day the rule goes live and it even said in last year's version of the rules, this rule will go live January 1st 2024, or whatever date it was that's the day you have to comply, right?

Speaker 1:

I know a couple of years ago the LMFT board came out with a rule that you had to have 14 hours, I think, of technology-assisted services, specific CEs. And I want to say the rule came out in November and was going to be live January 1st perhaps no, no, no, I take that back, I'm misspeaking. So I think the rule went live in November and I'm a December birthday, so I had like six weeks to find and pay for a course that gave me I think I want to say it was 14 hours. It was a lot y'all, it was a lot of hours to get in a very short period of time before I needed to say it was 14 hours, it was a lot y'all, it was a lot of hours to get in a very short period of time before I needed to renew my license. So that can be very scary for those of us who are maybe caught off guard because we wish, we hope there's a grandfather clause, but there is not.

Speaker 1:

All right, one of the things because I want to talk about solutions today, one of the things, ken, to talk about as a not a solution if you've messed up, but just to have peace of mind, is to have good liability insurance. You know the scary stories about well. You know my associate works at an agency and they provide the liability insurance. Yeah, that's great, but what if it turns into another, a lawsuit on top of the complaint? Right, it's, it just can go on and on and on, and so she recommended that having your associates get their own policy is a very, very good idea. I think she said even adding them to your insurance, or having them add you to their insurance, their liability insurance and she talked about some great ways to make sure the insurance that you have. And she did mention a name, but I'm not gonna mention it here because it's public, it's live, and I don't want anybody thinking I'm advocating for a particular company or that I don't like a particular company, although that's true.

Speaker 1:

But anyway, beside the point, you have some things that you can check to see. So, will they cover your attorney on the front end? Or are they like oh you know, let us know how it turns out and we'll pay you, you know, 30 cents on the dollar when the case is finished, and oh, by the way, then we're going to just raise your rates through the roof because you actually use the insurance that you pay for, right? So asking the same questions you might ask of your auto insurance, right? Especially if you have a teenage driver? Right, I'm getting insurance because I may have to use it. Don't give me a $10,000 deductible, right? So ask those types of questions Will you pay for an attorney when I find out I have a complaint, or are you going to just make sure I have one after the fact and I'm almost bankrupt because I've had to pay on my own?

Speaker 1:

So, speaking of complaints, and this is what I'm going to close with, and I thought kind of twice about this because I like to end on a positive note but this is really important and this is sort of near and dear to my heart for a very weird reason, but many of you who have worked with us through email will definitely understand. We all know email can get lost. Right Email goes to junk, email gets tagged as spam. Well, the new complaint process in Texas as of this recording, it's being rolled out is if you have a complaint filed against you, they are now going to notify you via email. And the way I can put it is this email looks very, very spammy because it is going to come from the investigator, and I don't keep track of the investigator names. I'm sure they're wonderful people, but I don't know who they are and they're not uniform emails. They may have the letterhead of the state, but they don't come in a specific form, so it could be a Word document, even that's emailed to you, detailing the complaint. So you know, as a business owner who relies very, very heavily on email, I could see where this could go wrong in a whole lot of ways, and Kenda expressed the same concern. So that might be something to really advocate for. If you live in Texas or you're licensed in Texas and you have an opportunity to attend a board meeting virtually, or one of their lunch and learns, you know, this might be a great thing to advocate for.

Speaker 1:

You know, the postal system just isn't reliable enough, even with certified mail, and that's the dilemma, right? They wanted to make sure that not only were these notices going out but they were getting received, and so the email. I don't know how that really solves the received part, but this is happening. Okay, so just be aware, check your spam mail, check your junk mail and if you see something from the state you know, check it out to make sure it's true, because anything can get spoofed, can it? I just saw a training on that, like 30 minutes ago. So, yeah, anything can be spoofed. So make sure that you ask if you have questions, but just be aware that that complaint process is changing.

Speaker 1:

All right, that's pretty much it. Those are my scary stories from the board. So I'm I mean I know I'm happy about that. I love it that our board is getting more streamlined. Tune into the episode about and for supervisors, though, because I will go into a little bit more detail on these complaints, specifically about supervision, because, supervisors, you're in that position of the shared liability and, oh my gosh, I'm liable for this other person, and how do I keep track of all that? What do I have to keep track of? And so she had some really good ideas, especially regarding. She had some really good ideas, especially regarding keeping track of things like website copy. So, all right, guys, I will see you live the next time and have a wonderful day. Thanks for watching the YouTube video.