Supporting Non-Clinical Staff through the Use of Clinical Supervision

Abstract

Clinical supervision is a commitment from supervisors to ensure the provision of quality services and nurture the professional growth of supervisees. Clinical supervision is made up of formative, normative, and restorative domains. While supervisors naturally focus on administrative and formative domains of clinical supervision, there needs to be a shift to focus more on clinical supervision’s restorative (self-related/self-care) domain. Given the workforce crisis, the unrest in the U.S., and post-pandemic residues, organizations must formalize clinical supervision to attend to their workforce. The study to assess the effectiveness of clinical supervision among non-licensed care coordinator, findings affirmed best clinical practices in the administrative and formative domains, while clinical supervision covering the restorative domain pointed to practices that were not deemed effective. Both care coordinators’ and supervisors’ views aligned on experiencing clinical supervision that did not prioritized discussions of “self” in supervision. Effective clinical supervision must equally focus on discussion in the three domains of clinical supervision, and supervisors must be equipped with the right tools to adopt the best clinical supervision practices. Crisis-based clinical supervision is one of the models supervisors can apply through the Just Practice framework to lean in more on the restorative domain of clinical supervision for non-licensed staff.