Clinical supervision: a means of promoting reciprocity between practitioners and academics

This paper explores the potential of adopting an alternative approach to the facilitation of clinical supervision in a practice context by focusing on the experiences of academic staff of facilitating clinical supervision for clinical colleagues. The exploratory study, which forms the basis for ideas generated, was very small and hence it might be better conceptualized as an analysis of conversations about practice understandings rather than research per se, and certainly, we make no claims of any possibility of generalizability. Nonetheless, we anticipate that our findings will be of interest to a wide audience involved in clinical supervision given that the supervision by academic staff of colleagues in practice is an unusual and unconventional departure from the norm.

The experiences of six academic staff from one higher education institution who were brought together to form a focus group provide the basis for discussion. Analysis of the structured discussion led to emergence of four major themes which are presented in an order that moves from the individuals’ experiences and perceptions of themselves in the process, to explore the relational nature of clinical supervision. The first theme highlights issues of professional identity or academics’ sense of themselves as health professionals and/or academics. This leads to the second theme that explores the tangible benefits identified by participants of providing clinical supervision as academics. The third theme about the perceived contribution that academics make to supervision, links, finally, to the perceived reciprocity that springs from clinical supervision relationships between academics providing supervision in practice, and clinicians. Our findings, based on this modest inquiry, suggest that this model of clinical supervision has potential to prove highly fruitful for both academic staff and their clinical colleagues.