A common General Registration Competencies for all psychologists requires dumbing down General Registration

• THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY COMPETENCIES DOCUMENT: AHPRA is developing a new hierarchal single psychology competencies document that will have all the competencies for all Psychologists, including psychologists with an Area of Practice Endorsement (AoPE) and those with no AoPE.
• WHAT ARE COMPETENCIES: These are defined by AHPRA as the skills and knowledge and other attributes that are required to first gain your psychology registration in Australia.
• FACT: The psychology competencies are part of the The National Scheme and as such the new psychology competencies document will be part of the Psychology Law - that will outline which psychologists have the necessary guaranteed skills and knowledge to offer certain psychological services and which psychologists don't have the guaranteed skills and knowledge to offer certain services like mental health diagnosis and therapies.
• QUESTION: If all psychologists in Australia have the same General Registration with AHPRA, then do all psychologists currently have the same psychology competencies requirement to obtain this general registration?
• ANSWER: The answer is NO.
• PATHWAY ONE: Some General Registered Psychologists gain their general registration by completing the 4+2 or the 5+1 pathways which includes needing to pass the National psychology Examination (NPE)
• PATHWAY TWO: Other General Registered Psychologists gain their general registration by completing a two-years masters in psychology, like the two-years clinical psychology masters, or the two-years counselling psychology masters, or the two-years organisational psychology masters, for example.
• THE PROBLEM: Both pathways above lead to the same General Registration with AHPRA, but both pathways above have different registration competencies requirements. The skills and knowledge that is gained through the different pathways are different, hence not all General Registered Psychologist have the same general registration competencies.
• FACT: The current 4+2 and the 5+1 General Registration pathways are a unique psychology training program that currently offers training for general registration in psychology, offering these psychologists a unique breadth of psychology skills and knowledge base, that currently overlaps with a lot of what is taught through the two-years masters, like mental health diagnosis and therapies.
• FACT: Those that gain their general registration through a two-years masters pathway, receive training that while being more advanced in some aspects to that gained through the 4+2 and 5+1 pathways, these two-years masters have a strong focused on only one of the multiple areas of practice endorsement, and hence these two-years masters are not only different from the 4+2 and 5+1, but because of the need to be focused on one area of practice, the two-years masters have less potential to be as broad as the 4+2 or 5+1 pathways in many ways.
• FACT: To see the breadth of skills and knowledge held by the current 4+2 and 5+1 General Registered Psychologists, one must only look at the National Psychology Examination Curriculum. And it is precisely this breath of skills and knowledge that AHPRA is now proposing to remove from the 4+2 and 5+1 General Registered Psychologists.
• A BIT OF HISTORY: The National Psychology Examination (NPE) was introduced to elevate the clinical registration requirements of those completing the 4+2 and 5+1 general registration pathways. For this, look at the National Psychology Exam Curriculum that outlines the 4+2 and 5+1 competencies, to see the depth of clinical psychology skills that are currently required to gain General Registration through the current 4+2 and 5+1 pathways.
• IMPORTANT: The critical point here is that the current training of the 4+2 and 5+1 offers a unique and robust holistic clinical psychology training pathway resulting in general registration, which is different from the general registration pathway of the two-years masters.
• THE BIG PROBLEM: In the new psychology competencies document, all psychologists must now hold the same General Registration Competencies, and the issues that I have with the Public consultation – Updating the competences for general registration, is how AHPRA has chosen to resolve the dilemma arising from the fact that the 4+2, the 5+1 and the two-years masters, all have different competencies requirements to gain their General Registration.
• AHPRA's DEVASTATING SOLUTION: With this Public consultation – Updating the competences for general registration AHPRA has opted to go backwards, from their upskilling decision made back when they introduced the NPE, AHPRA is now choosing to down-skill and hence dumb-down the 4+2 and 5+1 General Registered Psychologists, removing current competencies from the 4+2 and the 5+1 pathways, and as a consequence AHPRA will need to also shred to pieces the current National Psychology Exam Curriculum, dumbing down completely the current robust psychology training model of 4+2 and 5+1 General Registration Pathways.
• In the process dismantling the breadth of skills and knowledge competencies requirements found in the current 4+2 and the 5+1 pathways to general registration.
• WHAT IS AHPRA REALLY DOING: If a particular skill and knowledge gained through the current 4+2 or 5+1 is not part of the skills and knowledge gained through any of the two-years masters that also leads to general registration, AHPRA's solution is to remove this from the updated general registration competencies, even when this competency might be already part of the 4+2 and the 5+1 general registration competencies. One example of such a competency that is now being removed by the proposed Update to the Competencies for General Registration, is the Mental Health competencies that is currently part of the 4+2 and 5+1 pathways, outlined in the National Psychology Exam Curriculum.
• ONE EXAMPLE OF THE PROBLEM: The mental health competencies gained through the current 4+2 and 5+1 pathways are clearly far superior to the mental health competencies gained through the two-years organisational psychology masters, even though the above pathways lead to the same general registration. AHPRA now wants to make general registration competencies the same for all registered psychologists, which is clearly not the case at the moment. To achieve this, AHPRA is proposing to simply sacrifice the breadth of mental health competencies currently gained through the 4+2 and 5+1 general registration pathways, by removing mental health completely from the proposed updated competencies for general registration. This is because the current 4+2 and 5+1 mental health competencies are not part of the two-years organizational psychology masters pathway to general registration. The devastating solution that AHPRA has come up with, is to not include these mental health competencies in the updated competencies for general registration, and as a consequence AHPRA is choosing to dumb down the breadth of the current 4+2 and the 5+1 pathways to general registration.
• If there is a way that AHPRA has of saying that they don't value the 4+2 or the 5+1 general registered psychologists, this update to the competencies clearly wins the price.
• DILEMMA: If mental health is not part of the competencies gained through one of the two-years masters, that grants these graduates their general registration, then mental health can't be part of the updated competencies that are now supposed to be the same for all the general registered psychologists.
• The AoPE psychologists will have their area of practice specific competencies added into this new psychology competencies document at a later date. These specialised AoPE competencies will sit above the new common updated General Registration Competencies, now shared by all psychologists. In the end, nothing ends up being taken away from the competencies of the AoPE psychologists. But the updated General Registration Competencies, ends up leaving the 4+2 an 5+1 General Registered Psychologists with a truncated and dumbed down version of their current competencies. And in this way all psychologists now end up having the same general registration competencies.
• PROBLEM SOLVED AT THE EXPENSE OF THE 4+2 AND THE 5+1 GENERAL REGISTERED PSYCHOLOGISTS

What AHPRA is doing, and the lack of communication about what this update is really proposing is extremely wrong.