Licensure and Certification
Licensure and certification summarizes the mechanisms in place for identifying qualified psychologists, both at the governmental level, and by private organizations that credential licensed psychologists. Those terms are distinguished from and compared to other terms such as credentials, registered, and chartered. Standards for the recognition of psychologists are stated. Organizations that credential psychologists in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom are briefly described. Characteristics of credible credentialing organizations are summarized. 
 
 
Keywords: 
 
counseling psychology; 
health psychology; 
practice in clinical psychology; 
certification; 
credential; 
doctoral degree; 
globalization; 
health; 
health service psychologist; 
licensure
Licensing and Credentialing as Quality Management Tools in Behavioral Health Care
Professional licensing in health services has very little to do with the assurance of quality. While people assume it does, or wish it did, knowing that a provider is licensed assures us only that the state has determined him or her to possess a minimum level of competence. Minimum competence is typically defined as the provider having completed a defined sequence of education, training, and experience followed by successful performance on an independent examination of knowledge and skills.
Handbook of quality assurance in mental health
professional-standards-review organizations (PSRO) in defining quality of care for the Medicare program; it is a "shared responsibility of health professionals and government to provide a reasonable basis for confidence that action will be taken, both to assess whether services meet professionally recognized standards and to correct any deficiencies that may be found" (p. 14). Similar pronouncements have been made for the quality assurance activities of the Department of Defense's CHAMPUS program and of the 1980s successor to the PSROs, the federally designated peer-review organizations (PROs), established to ensure quality and utilization-efficient care for Medicare. Links between the federal and state gov- ernments and between professional associations and private review entities have been developed to make this "shared responsibility" manifest in the delivery and reimbursement of health services. This responsibility is seen in light of both pro- fessional and legal accountability, a view noted by Gibson and Singhas (1978) and Alger (1980). Accountability, then, becomes a concentric concept that elaborates on the pure view of quality and reflects the federal government's consumer protection activities during the 1970s. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH), which has pro- vided another primary historical leadership role in defining quality assurance, has promoted the evolution of the concept of resource limitations as a part of the defini- tion of quality assurance.