New Board Members and Honoring Regulatory Excellence at #CLEAR2026

In 2024, a routine review turned up an alarming statistic: massage therapy generated more sexual misconduct complaints than any other profession the Division of Professional Licensing (DOPL) regulates. Digging deeper, the Office of Professional Licensure Review (OPLR) found an estimated 150 to 195 illicit massage businesses operating in Utah — many functioning as fronts for human trafficking and commercial sex. Worse, fewer than a third of these businesses had records showing who actually owned them, and a patchwork of local rules let bad actors simply hop from city to city to dodge enforcement.

DOPL and OPLR's response was Utah House Bill 278 (2025), which created a statewide Massage Establishment Registry requiring:

Crucially, the initiative redirects enforcement away from the workers — who are frequently trafficking victims themselves — and squarely onto the owners profiting from the operations. DOPL paired the crackdown with public education, launching an awareness campaign during National Human Trafficking Awareness Month and requiring registered establishments to post their registration alongside a disclosure form with anti-trafficking resources and reporting instructions.

After the pandemic, the Office of Professional Standards (OPS) — the unit responsible for investigating ethics violations across the School District of Palm Beach County — lost decades of institutional knowledge as staff turnover hit a staggering 46%.

Rather than simply trying to rebuild what was lost, Director Edilia De La Vega used the crisis to modernize the department. Starting in Fall 2023, OPS made CLEAR's National Certificate for Investigator Training (NCIT) program mandatory for all new hires, giving a team with wildly different backgrounds — former law enforcement officers and career educators alike — a single, standardized, evidence-based investigative methodology.

OPS also extended its training beyond its own walls, creating a district-wide program to help principals and administrators handle preliminary evidence and ethics questions themselves — freeing investigators to focus on the most complex cases.

In 2023, the Ontario College of Pharmacists (OCP) found that more than 20% of assessed pharmacies were failing to meet national compounding standards — a gap tied directly to serious incidents, including chemotherapy underdosing cases at four Ontario hospitals and the death of a child from a compounding error.

OCP's response was an 18-month, cross-disciplinary effort to build the Non-Sterile Compounding Supervisor Training Course, which launched on February 5, 2026. The course covers eight modules plus a final exam, and is mandatory for new non-sterile compounding supervisors and for pharmacies not meeting standards — but free and open to anyone, in any jurisdiction. It's paired with new risk-assessment tools and templates to help pharmacies properly determine and document compounding risk levels.

"The program was well designed, thorough, and effective in providing guidance, practical scenarios, and knowledge checks throughout."

Early feedback has been strong, with a 4.71-out-of-5 average rating for improving understanding of national (NAPRA) standards and OCP's own assessment criteria. As the first program of its kind in Canada, it's already being positioned as a national model for other pharmacy regulators.

Dianne Millette had a job most regulators never face: building an entire regulatory body from scratch. As the founding CEO and Registrar of CHCPBC — now Canada's largest multi-profession regulator — she chose the harder, more ambitious path of full amalgamation over a simpler federated model, merging multiple legacy colleges into one unified organization.

All of it delivered in under two years — while building consensus across professions with deeply entrenched legacy practices, recruiting an entirely new team, and navigating skepticism from licensees and fellow regulators who'd never seen anything like it attempted in Canada. Millette has since taken the lessons from this work onto the international stage, sharing CHCPBC's experience at conferences to help other regulators considering similar reforms.

Dr. Yousra Alatiq led a national effort to transform how Saudi Arabia reviews the qualifications of its healthcare workforce — a system covering more than 700,000 practitioners from 140 nationalities. Before the reform, qualification review was inconsistent and slow, leaving practitioners uncertain of their status and regulators without a coherent way to weigh risk.

Between 2022 and 2024, her team:

By aligning qualification decisions with risk level, defined scope of practice, and professional equivalency, Dr. Alatiq turned what had been an administrative bottleneck into a transparent, risk-based governance function — one that regulators in other countries are now looking to as a scalable model.