New Mexico mental health practitioners want to stay relevant in the technological world we find ourselves in. We'd like the choice to be able to have truly useful, cutting edge CEU webinars and online courses offered throughout the country count toward our license renewal. Capping online courses at 12 hours (out of 40) is extremely limiting and puts NM clinicians at a real disadvantage.

Sign the following letter to The New Mexico Counseling and Therapy Practice Board asking them to expand online CEU hours.

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To The New Mexico Counseling and Therapy Practice Board:

“Online” now has so many meanings. With the rapid advances in technology, no longer can online learning be lumped into one category. It used to be that taking CEUs online was merely reading something and taking a test online. No longer. Webinars – where the computer viewer virtually sits with the audience for a full eight-hour day – is nearly the same as attending the conference, physically. A webinar attendee can participate in the very same way one could if one were there, physically: One can ask questions and participate in real-time online discussions with other webinar attendees. Attending conferences virtually is not the future; it is now. And, New Mexico’s mental health clinicians can’t afford to be left behind. Therefore, it makes good sense either to count webinar CEUs as “in person” hours, and permit the bulk, if not all, of CEU hours to be gotten online, as states like California allow.

There are some wonderful in-person CEU offerings in New Mexico, and we will continue to participate in those. But no one state can provide all the learning a clinician might want or need. So, added to New Mexico’s valuable contributions, there are offerings outside our borders that also greatly benefit our clinicians. Limiting the online CEU hours or limiting the definition of “in person,” keeps us from having those opportunities counted. California, widely known to have very stringent licensing requirements, allows all of its CEUs to be gotten online. New Mexico, in all its wonderful uniqueness, is in no way striving to be California, but we do want to stay relevant and competitive with the rest of the country, and current with the times.

When what mental health clinicians want to learn about isn’t offered in New Mexico’s cities and towns, it often makes a clinician’s CEU experience one of jumping through hoops, rather than a meaningful learning experience. CEU acquisition should be inspiring and motivating, furthering one’s education and knowledge base to help grow one’s practice, not an expensive “throw away day.”

In addition, the limited allowable online CEU credits creates a bias toward those clinicians who have the financial resources to travel to attend the conferences that they are, in fact, interested in. It would be an error to assume all clinicians have that luxury. Many of us do not. What about those of us who are excited to learn about a cutting edge theory and its clinical applications and the experts and leaders on the subject are conducting a conference in, say, Chicago, and we can’t afford the airfare, lodging, and other expenses? How frustrating and even invalidating it is for us when there is an engaging webinar offering for that conference that makes such learning within our grasp, but we know if its beyond the mere 12 online hours it won’t be counted toward our CEUs.

Moreover, CEUs are not cheap. Many of us cannot afford to take extra CEU courses we are interested in above and beyond the 40 hours because what we’re interested in isn’t offered within the constraints of the 28 hours of in-person credits. We need the accredited CEUs we’re interested in to count. Similarly, in this tight economy allowing greater online CEU acquisition could help the budgets of our cash-strapped mental health agencies that want to send their clinical employees to costly out of state workshops to gain the skills they need. No doubt, The Board doesn’t want to hamstring clinicians, but wants to concretely support those of us who want or are required to further our development in the clinical expertise we are working in or are interested in, but can’t afford to travel or take many more costly CEUs just to get the knowledge we really want from the experts that can give it to us.

Allowing so few online CEUs furthermore seems to unduly disadvantage clinicians who live in remote rural areas of New Mexico, where traveling long distances for even a day seminar is a real burden.

Online learning is not a threat to New Mexico’s mental health communities or local CEU offerings, but rather a boon. It enlivens our communities, expands our national presence, and helps create cutting edge clinicians who can then share that knowledge to other New Mexico clinicians via local CEU workshops, conferences, and groups.

New Mexico mental health clinicians deserve to have the vast bounty of accredited learning available to us and to have that learning honored by our licensing board by way of expanded CEU credit options. This, in turn, can’t help but benefit our New Mexican clients who deserve the very best of ourselves.

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We, the undersigned, respectfully request that The New Mexico Counseling and Therapy Practice Board count webinar CEUs as “in person” hours and greatly expand the allowable online CEU hours.