Clinical supervision

Supervision is used in counselling, psychotherapy, and other mental health disciplines as well as many other professions engaged in working with people. Supervision may be applied as well to practitioners in somatic disciplines for their preparatory work for patients as well as collateral with patients. Supervision is a replacement instead of formal retrospective inspection, delivering evidence about the skills of the supervised practitioners.

It consists of the practitioner meeting regularly with another professional, not necessarily more senior, but normally with training in the skills of supervision, to discuss casework and other professional issues in a structured way. This is often known as clinical or counselling supervision or consultation. The purpose is to assist the practitioner to learn from his or her experience and progress in expertise, as well as to ensure good service to the client or patient. Learning shall be applied to planning work as well as to diagnostic work and therapeutic work.

Some practitioners (e.g. art, music and drama therapists, chaplains, psychologists, and mental health occupational therapists) have used this practice for many years. In other disciplines the practice may be a new concept. For NHS nurses, the use of clinical supervision is expected as part of good practice. In a randomly controlled trial in Australia, White and Winstanley looked at the relationships between supervision, quality of nursing care and patient outcomes, and found that supervision had sustainable beneficial effects for supervisors and supervisees. Waskett believes that maintaining the practice of clinical supervision always requires managerial and systemic backing, and has examined the practicalities of introducing and embedding clinical supervision into large organisations such as NHS Trusts (2009, 2010).

Clinical supervision is used in many disciplines in the British National Health Service. Registered allied health professionals such as occupational therapists,physiotherapists,dieticians,speech and language therapists and art,music and drama therapists are now expected to have regular clinical supervision. C. Waskett (2006) has written on the application of solution focused supervision skills to either counselling or clinical supervision work. Practising members of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy are bound to have supervision for at least 1.5 hours a month. Students and trainees must have it at a rate of one hour for every eight hours of client contact.

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