File photo from Dec. 16, 2021. Legislative efforts to increase mental healthcare workers in the state allowed for test fees to be waived for applicants seeking a social worker license. But with increase demand and staffing issues, a backlog formed and applicants have now had to wait months to get a license approved.
Bob Payne / OPB
Oregon is facing a shortage of mental healthcare professionals. A recent report from Mental Health America found 27% of adult Oregonians are living with a mental illness. At the same time, Oregon has the fourth-highest rate of unmet mental health treatment needs in the country.
At the beginning of the year, legislative efforts allowed the Oregon Board of Licensed Social Workers to temporarily waive test exam fees for those seeking any social worker license. Funds allocated also allowed fees for new applications and some license renewals to be waived as well.
The Oregon Health Authority has said these waivers were meant to address the growing demand for social workers, as well as to counterbalance the number of people who left the industry during the pandemic.
However, some people seeking a license are still faced with long wait times. Nathan Smith is a licensed clinical social worker who moved to Oregon from Indiana and waited five months for his application to be processed and approved.
“I never got an application number. I never was notified about where my application was in the process,” he said. “For those of us that are already licensed and have been practicing for several years, it just seemed like that would streamline the process.”
He began the application process in May 2023, and when he moved to Oregon the next month in June, he found his application was still not approved.
Since Smith has a license to practice in Tennessee and Indiana, he was surprised with how long it took and worried the wait times could deter others from breaking into the industry.
“When I got it, it was kind of anticlimactic,” Smith said. “There’s so many other people that just try and give up.”
According to Interim Director of the Oregon Board of Licensed Social Workers Lou Savage, because of fee waivers and telehealth, the board saw three times more applications coming from outside of Oregon than in 2022.
“Last year at this time, there were 292 out-of-state license applications. This year, 2023, there are 886,” Savage said.
The board is also a small agency with only five employees and only three of them are directly involved with processing. Savage says that in August of last year, the board lost one of those three people and that position was vacant for five months.
“The combination of the increase in out-of-state licensure and the decrease in staff really overwhelmed the system,” Savage said.
The board has begun some triaging efforts for Clinical Social Worker Associate applications, as many new graduates are looking for work and the healthcare system needs these types of licenses.
He says they’ve managed to drop the backlog from 219 applications in August to 111 as of this month. The board has also reduced wait times with the addition of new staff and upgrades to the system to make the process quicker.
“We’re really confident that by the end of the year, we will be significantly caught up with the backlog,” Savage said.
Nathan Smith and Lou Savage both joined OPB’s “Think Out Loud.” You can listen to the full interview here: