Mental Health Professionals: How Do You Log Clinical Contact Hours?
Good news for practitioners looking for an easy way to log clinical contact hours: our simple clinical logbooks have been updated for the 2007-08 calendar, academic, and financial years. For the first time, we also have a special version for online practitioners eager to escape the ethical quicksand of reporting online clinical experience in misleading calendar time.
My three months of paternity leave (“New Project for the Managing Editor”) delayed the announcement for awhile, but our free clinical logbook software for PCs and Macs has been updated to cover calendar year 2007, fiscal year 2007-08, and academic year 2007-08. (Editor’s Note, 2010: We’ve now stopped updating the clinical logbook.)
Since first offering the clinical logbooks in 2002, I’ve been pleased to see that students and practitioners around the globe have been downloading them and using them to help stay on top of hours recording. (I’m afraid the instructions for using the logbooks haven’t been updated for quite awhile, so they’re starting to look pretty long in the tooth; but I’m confident you’ll still figure it out!)
And new this year for online practitioners: a special version of the logbook modified to track word counts rather than office visits. Why would you want to do that? Well, the main reason is that online clients don’t have office visits, and unless you’re using chat (in which case just count hours anyway), contacts rarely occur on the same kind of regular schedules and durations which characterize face-to-face visits in an office. Counting ‘visits’ for asynchronous online clients makes little sense, and counting weeks (or any other measure of calendar time) verges on just plain silly.
Online practitioners curious about the broader ethical quicksand of reporting online therapy experience in terms of years or other calendar units rather than a quantitative measure like word counts might be interested in our article called . (Not too surprisingly, describing their online experience in years is very popular amongst those ‘old timers’ in the field who have spent many years doing not very much actual online therapy.)
