AnaP17

Hi there,

I am a qualified UK Clinical Psychologist who is moving to Australia in August. While the APA has validated my doctorate the AHPRA changed the rules in July 2013 and now they require that I undergo a three month supervised transitional program and sit the National Exam before I can apply for general registration. I was wondering if anyone has been through this process already and could answer some questions.

Any thoughts or advice are greatly appreciated.
Many thanks
Anna

quoll

Ouch! AHPRA were always tricky to deal with but I'm well out of the loop wrt recent developments (thank heavens!) do you really want to work in Australia with all that palaver? There are more psychs to the square inch than anywhere rose in the world I should think. Good luck! Sounds like a real chore and a half!

AnaP17

Thank you. It seems like the rules have changed recently but I'm hoping that it won't be as bad as it sounds right now!

ps3jmb

Hi Anna,

I was just wondering how the process of getting a job in Australia and gaining accreditation was for you?

I am interested in moving and im not really sure where to start!

Thanks,
Jenna

Pollyana

Posts regarding Job Offer moved to http://britishexpats.com/forum/showthread.php?t=833382

Lifeinoz

Hi Anna,
I am a counselling psychologist from the uk recently moved to oz and I have to go through a 3 month transition programme. It seems difficult to find a paid placement/job for this as all the jobs seem to require fully registered psychologists. Where did you complete the programme? Did you manage to get a paid placement? Any advice on how to find a placement would be appreciated.

psymann

My wife is a clinical psychologist and we have just finally got to a stage where she's got a job lined up (in Perth, WA).

It was quite a trial getting there.

The first issue was with the migration code - the forms have separate options for putting yourself down as a "Clinical Psychologist" (code 272311) or a "Psychologist NEC" (code 272399). She's a clinical psychologist, so we'd expected to list her as 272311. Until we discovered that according to the rules, she can't put herself down as 272311 unless she's got accreditation from AHPRA to say that she really is a clinical psychologist. Which she can't get until she's moved to Australia and started working as a clinical psychologist. Which she can't do until she's got the visa. Which she can't apply for as a clinical psychologist because she's not accredited yet. Etc etc. Catch 22.

The advice from our migration agent was that when they take people out of the EOI pool, they only really look at the first 4 digits of the code anyway. And therefore 2723-11 and 2723-99 looked the same and you would be just as likely to get a visa with one as the other. And since it was impossible to get a 272311 code due to the Catch 22, we put her down as 272399, and she was in the end pulled off the EOI list within a week. Whether they've realised this nonsensical circular problem and fixed it in the last year-and-a-half, I don't know!

That turned out to be the easy bit - we had the visa granted last June (2013), and then in July 2013 the rules changed to include this new three-month placement and exam.

Now actually, we didn't want to move anyway until September 2014, so she didn't start looking for jobs until June 2014.

Since June 2014, she applied for three jobs advertised online in Perth.

The first two she applied for, she found both employers very keen after reading her CV, and communicating with her over e-mail. She's usually a strong candidate in the UK, and seemed even more so in Perth. However, after initial great enthusiasm, the trail went a little cold with the three-month placement requirement. They keenly left it saying they'd look at how they could make it work (as they weren't really familiar with the new system), but then took ages to come back and the enthusiasm had waned. The main sticking point seemed to be that during the three-month placement, you're not officially qualified and therefore work you do can't be claimed back from medicare. Which means if you do medicare work, they don't get paid. Funnily enough, they didn't like the sound of that! She did offer to work the three months for free at one point, but that didn't seem to solve the problem either.

In the end it turned out not to matter, because she then found a third option. This was with a not-for-profit organisation who had an alternative source of funding that wasn't medicare, and therefore they didn't have this claiming-back-money issue. They were therefore happy to do the three-month placement, and she 'looks forward' to having to do the exam.

It certainly seems a problem - we're not sure how few and far between these viable positions are, as many of them seem to have this medicare issue. The staff at AHPRA were good at replying to her questions via e-mail, but weren't usually able to provide answers that solved the underlying problems of a system which requires you to be registered before you can do things, but doesn't let you register until you've done the things.

One thing we noted was that university students are also not registered, and also have to do similar three-month placements, and presumably therefore finding out how they go about getting theirs might help find something that works. That was probably our next option had she not found this other role.

It all seems surprising that it's so much harder to get agreement that you're a clinical psychologist than it was getting the visas in the first place. And whereas you can use a migration agent to help with the visa forms, there's no-one we found able to help with the AHPRA ones.

On the plus side, at least they have worthy aims of protecting the profession and making sure that only good quality people are able to call themselves clinical psychologists. Just a shame it's so hard to achieve!

More info available on this other australia-specific ex-pat forum:
http://www.*************/forum/migra...out-there.html

Good luck :-)

rathjam

Hi there, I was wondering if I could reignite this thread. Ana, did you move in August and how did it go.

I qualified last year (2014) and currenly work in the NHS but am looking to move out to Australia next July. I'll have working 1 year 6 months then so I should have overcome the 1 year experience problem that I've read a lot about on forums.

Would be great to get an update on how you got on with the move and any advice.

Currently we have an emigration expert looking into visas etc but advice on registration and getting qualifications recognised would be helpful.

Many thanks

James