Why is the ACSW not doing program approvals in-house?
The ACSW is a member of the Association of Social Work Boards and the approval mechanism they provide is a member benefit. This is ‘our’ program. An approval process for continuing education activities is not simply a matter of looking at a brochure and deciding whether or not the content is relevant. If it was this simple, it would not be long before programs are developed that have very poor standards but are able to survive (and make money) by keeping their costs below that of high quality programs. An approval mechanism needs first to establish a set of standards for content, process, and presenter. Then all the people providing programs would need to be approved. Given the hundreds of programs offered each year that are relevant to the broad range of social work practice, it is cost and time prohibitive to develop an in-house mechanism.
