Clinical supervision can help newly graduated students in the counselling and mental health professions gain experience and knowledge, as well as provide a platform for feedback, improvement, and development. Through clinical supervision, new practitioners can receive personalized advice and guidance from experienced practitioners. The clinical supervisor has a multi-faceted role, requiring a deep understanding of the practice and an acute awareness of their own strengths and limitations. As clinical supervisors, they develop, administer, and evaluate a plan of supervision that meets the needs of the supervisee. To provide the best possible supervision, the clinical supervisor needs to be both supportive and critical in their feedback.
The primary role of the clinical supervisor is to ensure a safe and effective therapeutic experience for the client; thus, effective clinical supervision ensures clients receive competent care. Rendering effective supervision, counsellors should pursue gaining knowledge, developing abilities, unleashing their potential as mental health professionals, boosting medical effectiveness, ensuring customer preservation, and workforce fulfilment and contentment. The clinical supervisor is also the liaison between administrative and clinical matters.
The following are the roles of clinical supervisors:
The clinical supervisor holds exceptional positions and performs the roles and responsibilities of a supporter of the organization’s ultimate aim, which is to provide mental health care and suitable therapy remedies for the clients. In addition, clinical supervisors can be considered champions who offer themselves to strengthen the organization, uplift counsellor’s passion, and ensure quality client care. Basically, they are the key connector between the management and staff who serves at the forefront of the therapeutic process. Further, a strong partnership between these important personalities, the supervisor, and the supervisee, is deemed vital to the supervisor’s role. Below are the supervisory or managerial roles performed by clinical supervisors to find out how relevant are they in the field in terms of their connection. Hence, clinical supervisors serve as:
Teacher: The clinical supervisor serves as a teacher, sharing knowledge and providing guidance to the supervisee to help them develop their clinical skills and competencies. This means the clinical supervisor will assist in the development of counselling knowledge and apply the skills by recognizing what needs to be learned, distinguishing the factors that help the counsellor perform well, fostering self-consciousness, conveying what they learned to affect the real world, and ensuring proficient career development. Further, clinical supervisors showcase their passion to educate, train, and act as specialists in this field.
Mentor: The clinical supervisor also serves as a mentor, offering support, encouragement, and motivation to the supervisee to help them advance their professional development. As a mentor, the known expert qualified supervisor performs and directs the supervisee to act as a role model. In addition, they can also assist the therapist’s total educational growth and sense of professional individuality, and provide updated training handled by experts intended for the next batch of aspiring supervisors ready to serve the future generation.
Advisor: The clinical supervisor also serves as an advisor, advising and guidance to the supervise to help them make sound professional decisions. In this supportive role, clinical supervisors plan activities to boost morale, evaluate strengths and needs, suggest different clinical approaches, act as role models, give encouragement, and prevent burnout.
Consultant: The clinical supervisor also serves as a consultant, offering insight and expertise to the supervisee to help them refine their clinical techniques. Revealed in the study by Bernard and Goodyear (2004) stated that clinical supervisory functions comprise deliberating the case or treatment by the therapist and the client, conducting crucial evaluation and assessment, keeping track of the counsellor’s achievement, and advising the counsellor regarding the discharge of his duties and responsibilities. Moreover, the supervisors are capacitated to deliver case options for the creation of new ideas, ensure management of tasks performed by counsellors to succeed in the intentions or goals, and exhibit ethical and professional standards to provide safeguards for the organization and gain control through the enforcement of obedience and order, for instance, diagnosing and directing efforts to the counsellor’s fragility or incapacity.
The clinical supervisor can help the supervisee become an independent practitioner by teaching, mentoring, giving advice, and consulting with the supervisee.
The clinical supervisor must use a well-defined supervision model and have a sense of purpose in his or her oversight position. Further, there are four existing relevant supervisory orientations to consider. It includes:
Competency-based models. These models focus on developing the supervisee’s technical competence, problem-solving skills, and ability to apply knowledge. In addition, there are examples of models used such as the micro training, the task-oriented model (Mead, 1990), and the discrimination model (Bernard & Goodyear, 2004). These competency-based models concentrate mostly on the supervisee’s competencies and educational requirements, and on establishing specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely (SMART) objectives. They use and apply approaches to reach these objectives, such as using shared and collective educational beliefs, guidelines, and standards. Examples of these are showing character setbacks, character playacting, and training. More so, demonstrating and employing a variety of supervisory functions are the core strategies of competency-based models (teaching, consulting, and counselling).
Treatment-based models. In this approach, the supervisee will be trained in a specific theoretical approach to counseling. Counselors who adhere to a particular psychotherapy orientation, such as Adlerian, solution-focused, behavioral, etc., frequently believe that the most effective “clinical supervision” is to assess their own practice to determine adherence to the orientation they adopted. For example, a counsellor who comes from a cognitive-behavioral therapy orientation will seek supervision that highlights the counsellor’s positive traits, seek the supervisee’s comprehension of the theory and model taught, and apply the model’s methods and techniques. The CBT supervision model will outline the treatment strategy and describe the therapeutic principles of this approach during the supervision process.
Clinical supervision
Developmental approaches. Basically, the developmental approach gives unlimited opportunities for people who are with disabilities and those suffering from mental health for them to get social interactions, psychological stability, and functional skills in encouraging working backgrounds. In addition, this approach acknowledges that every counsellor undergoes several phases of progress and realizes that passing over these phases isn’t permanently direct and can be susceptible to various changes in terms of role, location, and populace being worked for. Thus, we are growing continuously by combining our experience and inherited traits; we develop our strengths and areas for improvement. The aim is to maximize and identify future growth requirements. The research looked at the connection between the supervisor’s behavior and the development of their supervisees. Through these studies, it became apparent that the supervisor’s behavior can play an important role in helping supervisees grow and develop. The results highlighted the importance of a supervisor’s behavior in enabling supervisees to grow and develop professionally.
Integrated models. Many therapists consider themselves “eclectic” and incorporate multiple theories into their practice; several supervision models were created to be used with multiple therapeutic orientations. The discrimination model, for instance, is intended to combine a focus on three supervisory roles and three areas of concentration. Supervisors may assume the role of “teacher” when they lecture and instruct their supervisees directly. Supervisors can function as counsellors when they aid supervisees in recognizing their own “blind spots” or the way they are unknowingly “hooked” by a client’s issue. When supervisors interact as peers during co-therapy, they may assume the role of “consultant.”
Each of the three roles is task-specific to discover supervision difficulties. For instance, taking on a “counsellor” role in supervision serves the aim of identifying unsolved difficulties that obscure a therapeutic relationship. If these concerns cause continuous therapy, supervisees should seek their own therapists.
At Resilience Counseling-London, we offer clinical supervision to university students and interns in a highly supportive yet challenging professional environment that is tailored to the individual’s professional needs for them to become effective and independent practitioners. We offer a wide range of clinical experiences, such as intakes, assessments, case conceptualization and management, intervention planning, outreach, advocacy, networking, and research.
Contact us and one of our team members will get back to you within 48 hours.
111 Waterloo St unit 406 London ON N6B2M4
mail@resiliencec.com
Phone + 1 (226) 374-4457
Cell + 1(226) 210-4170
Fax + 1 (226) 916-0283
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