Enablers of and barriers to high quality clinical supervision among occupational therapists across Queensland in Australia: findings from a qualitative study
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2015
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Martin, P.
Kumar, S.
Lizarondo, L.
VanErp, A.
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BMC Health Services Research, 2015; 15(1):413-1-413-8
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Priya Martin, Saravana Kumar, Lucylynn Lizarondo, and Ans VanErp
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BACKGROUND Health professionals practising in countries with dispersed populations such as Australia rely on clinical supervision for professional support. While there are directives and guidelines in place to govern clinical supervision, little is known about how it is actually conducted and what makes it effective. The purpose of this study was to explore the enablers of and barriers to high quality clinical supervision among occupational therapists across Queensland in Australia. METHODS This qualitative study took place as part of a broader project. Individual, in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with occupational therapy supervisees in Queensland. The interviews explored the enablers of and barriers to high quality clinical supervision in this group. They further explored some findings from the initial quantitative study. RESULTS Content analysis of the interview data resulted in eight themes. These themes were broadly around the importance of the supervisory relationship, the impact of clinical supervision and the enablers of and barriers to high quality clinical supervision. DISCUSSION This study identified a number of factors that were perceived to be associated with high quality clinical supervision. Supervisor-supervisee matching and fit, supervisory relationship and availability of supervisor for support in between clinical supervision sessions appeared to be associated with perceptions of higher quality of clinical supervision received. Some face-to-face contact augmented with telesupervision was found to improve perceptions of the quality of clinical supervision received via telephone. Lastly, dual roles where clinical supervision and line management were provided by the same person were not considered desirable by supervisees. A number of enablers of and barriers to high quality clinical supervision were also identified. CONCLUSION With clinical supervision gaining increasing prominence as part of organisational and professional governance, this study provides important lessons for successful and sustainable clinical supervision in practice contexts.
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© 2015 Martin et al. Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.