Faced with monthslong waits for their licenses, health care workers from New York to Wisconsin are pushing to add staff and speed processing at state agencies.
The licensing agency can’t say how long applications are taking because its manual record-keeping system does not calculate those figures, and doing so would take staff time away from addressing the application backlog.
Last year, the agency requested eight additional permanent positions and two temporary ones. The Legislature gave it the temporary staff, but only one permanent position. “There were always delays, but now it’s harder,” said Dr. Sheldon Wasserman, chairperson of the Wisconsin Medical Examining Board. “It’s a skin and bone operation.”
In the past year, psychologists and social workers in New York have found themselves facing application waits many times longer than normal, limiting their job prospects. Any delays in application processing are a “direct result of insufficient staffing,” the New York Department of Education, which houses the licensing agency, said in a statement. While funding for the licensing agency, known as the Office of the Professions, comes from licensing fees, “over the past decade, however, the Department’s authority to spend the revenue collected has been restricted by the [state] Division of the Budget.
Those licenses used to come in about three to four months, said Jennifer Thompson, executive director of the state association. “The past two years, if not two and a half, those delays have been astronomical. What we are seeing now is a real crisis.” The division said it has also taken steps to improve application processing, including hiring additional staff and adding a call center. They’re already paying off, a spokesperson said. In 2021, the New Jersey Board of Social Work Examiners issued more licenses than in any previous year.The waning of the pandemic won’t necessarily mean the end of bottlenecks.
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