State Licensure Update: Giving Voice to the Value and Vision

Extract

A session entitled “State Licensure and Legislative Issues” is a perennial event on the ASCLS Annual Meeting agenda. It always draws impressive attendance as various state societies share their experiences in learning about the licensure process, building coalitions with other laboratorians, drafting bill language, finding their way through the state legislature, and responding to those who oppose licensure.

This year's panel of speakers focused mainly on sources of opposition that have been encountered by various state licensure committees, and strategies for responding to that opposition. There was a short introductory portion on licensure basics that can be found in more detail on the ASCLS Web page.

Clinical laboratory science practitioners are licensed in eleven states and Puerto Rico. According to information gathered by the ASCLS Government Affairs Committee, approximately twenty other states are in some phase of licensure activity, from preliminary discussions on through having bills submitted in their state legislatures. Many laboratorians feel passionately about the advantages of licensure to the patients they serve and to themselves as professionals:

• Protect the public health and safety; assure quality of laboratory services,

• Create a mechanism to identify, locate, and mobilize practitioners in the event of a bioterrorism or other public safety threat, and

• Protect the scope of practice of laboratory professionals.

Opposition to proposed state licensure laws has historically come from pathology professional organizations, from state hospital associations, and sometimes from other organizations representing laboratorians, such as the American Association of Bioanalysts (AAB).

However, the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP)…