Recently I have read…
Clinical supervision: A mechanism to support person-centred practice?
By Grace Cook, FoNS Person-centred Practice Facilitator and Resilience-based Clinical Supervision Lead
At FoNS, we have a monthly journal club. We, as a team, suggest journal articles that we think will be useful for our work and take it in turns to facilitate a reflective discussion about them. This has been a great way for us all to learn, extend our theoretical understanding and think about the impact on us as facilitators and as an organisation.
I recently read “Clinical supervision: a mechanism to support person-centred practice? An integrative review of the literature” by Edgar et al. (2021). I suggested this for journal club as it explored clinical supervision and person-centredness, two things that I am passionate about.
The article is an integrative literature review exploring whether clinical supervision has an influence on person-centered practice. While there is a lack of clear definition across literature and practice about these concepts, the authors are really clear on the definitions they are using ensuring that they are theoretically underpinned. The Person-centred Practice Framework is used throughout the article to consider the outcomes as well as influences (from a micro, meso and macro perspective).
The themes that arose from the articles they reviewed were that clinical supervision was often used to supplement learning sessions as opposed to being an ongoing reflective tool. They also found that there was an effect, both personal and professional, on participants that have attended clinical supervision including on their wellbeing, learning and self-awareness, and they concluded that clinical supervision has a positive influence on participants’ person-centred attributes.
The impact on colleagues and patients is less clear (which is a common theme across the clinical supervision evidence base generally). This was mainly perceived but there are some small positive studies that identified an impact on others.
However, more evidence is needed. Only twelve articles were identified, indicating that the impact of clinical supervision on person-centredness is under researched.
Ultimately the authors concluded that clinical supervision leads to a culture of support within a team/organisation and can be used as part of a strategy to develop person-centred cultures. This is something I have noticed within RBCS as well, the active support from leadership and responding to themes identified within the supervision sessions can enable changes to be made in the ways people work together which can have a positive impact on culture.