Life Long Learning Project

Foundation Stones - Clinical Supervision is

Regular protected time with another professional, in which you can talk about your thoughts, feelings and plans for your work. It's not about management supervision, or clinical teaching, vital though these are. This is about YOU as a practitioner, learning from mistakes, developing strengths, keeping a sparkle in your professional step.

It's spreading across GM in a variety of forms and styles. People are learning how to facilitate others to discover their strengths, creativity and skills; to learn from experience, and begin to explore and build on their own aspirations for their work.

What kind of questions might a supervisor might invite you to ponder?
"How would you like to do that differently next time?" 
"How do you see yourself when you're working at your best?"
Supervision is a little haven of thinking time with a supportive professional - and it can make a lot of difference. You might be reluctant, for good reasons, to squeeze time from a demanding workload. But even a little bit of clinical supervision time over the year may help you to work smarter, think more clearly, make or cope with changes, and be more assertive and confident at work.
Clinical supervision can be structured in a variety of ways. You can work one-to-one with a trained supervisor or with a peer. You can meet with colleagues as a group of peers, or with a supervisor as facilitator.
A current challenge is to provide a balance of clinical supervisors with facilitation skills, professionals enabled to use them, and Trusts giving their support. We're working on it.

Further Information:

Clinical Supervision Unravelled - a suggested process of developing a robust clinical supervision scheme.

Teaching Handouts about clinical supervision, used by the Lifelong learning team.

The Clinical Supervision network page - people across GM at various stages of establishing clinical supervision - contact them from this site for more details.

Facilitation Skills - handy language skills for use in supervision, or with colleagues or patients and their families.