Roles and Responsibilities of Clinical Supervisors
The position of supervisor is a skilled and responsible one. It is important that it is entered into with an understanding of the level of commitment that is required. The role involves facilitating and supporting the work being practiced by the supervisee.
Supervisors need to enable supervisees to take responsibility for their own actions, behaviours, encouraging curiosity and enabling insight into a supervisees own practice. Contemporary health and care practice is inherently multi-professional, reflecting the need to have the right skills in the right place for patient benefit.
As a consequence, healthcare practitioners increasingly work in non-traditional roles and settings and this extends to supervision arrangements. Where a supervisor and supervisee do not share the same professional registrations, supervisors should be familiar with the differences between the relevant practitioners' registrations and scopes of practice, particularly with regard to the implications for both clinical practice and supervision.
With any supervision, it should not be assumed that one supervisor will be best placed to address all supervisory concerns, but specific signposting within and across professions should be anticipated in the multi-professional context.
Key responsibilities include:
- Preparing for each session and enabling supervisees to come into the space.
- Attention to the room, time of day, ground rules and agreed way of working.
- Being reliable and available at agreed times.
- Holding the physical space for the duration of the session.
- Maintaining professional and appropriate content boundaries.
- Maintaining confidentiality within the boundaries of the law and professional codes of conduct.
- Keeping time.
- Record keeping.
- Maintaining a structure to the sessions.
- Guiding the reflective process through appropriate support and challenge.
This course will furnish you with tools and techniques to be an effective and safe supervisor. This course is recognised as providing NHSE approved clinical supervision training to enable multi-professional supervision delivery.
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