Legislation Alert: New Regulatory Bodies Proposed for PSWs and Behavioural Analysts

New provincial legislation is being proposed to regulate PSWs and behavioural analysists. The newly proposed law, The Advancing Oversight and Planning in Ontario’s Health System Act, 2021, was introduced yesterday afternoon by the government.  That law would enact three pieces of legislation as follows:

Health and Supportive Care Providers Oversight Authority Act, 2021.

• This Act would establish a regulatory authority for PSWs, which would allow PSWs to voluntarily register with the body to ensure consistency in PSW education, training, and standards of practice.  For now this would be a voluntary system of regulation that would have an official flavour to it.
• The regulatory authority would have statutory powers for representation for clients, the profession, and educators, would have the power to deal with complaints, dispute resolution, and investigations of registrants, and post public information about registrants. In short, this would allow the public to easily identify if a PSW is a member and that the member meets certain standards.  This could be a boon to agencies and families trying to determine whether PSWs have the appropriate training, skills and background to support vulnerable people.
• It’s possible that, as with other professional regulatory bodies, suspensions and termination of membership could be a consequence of misconduct – which would allow for better access to information about workers who have engaged in disqualifying conduct that employers and families could then access when making hiring decisions.

Psychology and Applied Behaviour Analysis Act, 2021,

The second piece of legislation is would replace the Psychology Act and merge behavioural analysists into the College of Psychologists (which would have the new name, the College of Psychologists and Behaviour Analysts).  This would be more traditional regulation, with defined scope of practice and protection for the title of “Behaviour Analyst”.

COVID-19 Vaccination Reporting Act

The third piece of legislation that would be introduced is the COVID-19 Vaccination Reporting Act.  Under this legislation, individuals who receive the COVID-19 vaccine are asked to share information such as name, date of birth, sex, full address, and phone number. These are important to have on record in order to track who receives a vaccine and if/when a subsequent dose should be administered.

Ontarians are also being asked to voluntarily share socio-demographic information such as race, ethnicity, childhood language, total household income and household size.  According to the government, collecting this data will help the province have a more complete picture of who is being vaccinated and how to ensure a more equitable and efficient vaccine rollout across the province.

The proposed legislation if passed, would require persons or entities who administer the COVID-19 vaccine to disclose to the Ministry of Health COVID-19 vaccine related data collected from individuals who consent to the disclosure of their information.