Hi all, Remember there are several pathways to become eligible to sit the exam. I believe there are 4 components to qualifying status: 1) requirements for college degrees (or comparable "schooling") which serves to ensure the candidate has a basic science, humanities, etc foundation. The degree can be in any number of disciplines. 2) There are requirements for c.e. hours in the recent past, which have to be on lactation, and serves to ensure the candidate has up to date lactation knowledge; 3) there are requirements for counseling hours which serves to ensure the candidate has "real experience with real mothers/babies" and 4) there is the requirement of having recommendations from one's peers or superiors. Most of these requirements are being "tweaked" and more specifically delineated. That is to say, there is more specific didactic coursework being laid out to fit criteria #1, there is or will be more specific lactation topics that need to be addressed in the c.e. requirement to fit with the exam blueprint, and the counseling hours may need to be mentored and specifically logged. Not sure how to put this without being offensive: this is to try to prevent say, someone who has a degree in accounting and runs a pump rental depot (not saying this is necessarily someone who should not sit for exam) and has taken one 3 day breastfeeding c.e. program, to then sit the exam, counting her pump rental business as hours toward counseling. This really could be done, or at least in the past, and certainly that person may be very experienced and make quite a good LC. But being more specific in requirements etc will make the pathway better at assuring we are getting capable candidates. Re the LLL hours: the 5 years should serve to ensure that those with high volume or those with low volume of contacts still have enough counseling hours (along with the other 3 requirements) to take the exam. If a LLLL is doing really high volume of contacts, she could log them, and conceivably meet the requirement of counseling hours sooner than 5 yrs, say in 3 years. Nurses do the same thing. They probably have not specifically logged all of their hours of counseling bf moms. So they estimate as best they can the amount of hours they spend working with bf moms and they take the no. of years they have been doing that and come up with their hours, signed off by a supervisor who affirms they are being truthful. This is my understanding of the process. Until we have a university or other structured program to LCdom, this is the best system we have, altho I think we can all admit it is not perfect. Someone from iblce please chime in. Laurie Wheeler, IBCLC, MN, RN New Orleans Louisiana, s.e. USA _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html