Supervision

Clinical supervision brings practitioners and skilled supervisors together to reflect on clinical practice with the aim of identifying solutions to problems, improve practice and increase understanding of professional issues.

All clinical staff should be familiar with the Clinical Supervision Policy and Procedure, which can be found in the policies and procedures library.

How often should I have clinical supervision?

The minimum frequency for receiving formal clinical supervision is as advised within your profession-specific guidelines and codes of conduct, however where a timeframe is not specified by a regulatory body, the Trust's position is that the minimum frequency for receiving formal clinical supervision at least once every eight weeks.

Supervision

Supervision is our single platform which allows you to capture your clinical supervision sessions. The system has been developed to make recording easier for you and also provide robust evidence that clinical supervision is taking place.

Some key points about the system:

• It is set up so you have an individual clinical supervisor, however you can have supervision from other clinical staff (on a one-to-one or in a group) 
• If you are supervisor, it will show the staff you are allocated as a clinical supervisor when you log-in
• If you are being supervised, the supervisor logs into the system and makes the record. This ensures that the supervision is logged into the system. As the supervisee, you can add your own comments when you log into your individual account. Once supervisions are recorded and saved, the system generates an automatic email to the supervisee to advise the record has been created and you would then need to go into the system and validate the record – this is when you can add your own comments
• The system is set up to flag up if you are overdue supervision. The minimum expectation for clinical supervision is once every 8 weeks. Some staff may access much more than this, and this will be dependent on your role and individual needs
• The system is accessible from your PC, laptop or mobile device or tablet

We have produced a series of frequently asked questions to help you use the system. However if you have any unanswered questions or issues using the system, please email: paceandsupervision@merseycare.nhs.uk.

If you have any technical issues, such as being unable to access the system, please contact the IT Helpdesk.

Supervision type

One-to-one clinical supervision

This is formal and takes place between two members of staff with the supervisor usually being senior to the supervisee.

Peer/group clinical supervision

This is formal  and takes place with more than two staff members who may or may not be of the same profession

External clinical supervision

This is formal and is when a staff member accesses clinical supervision (either one-to-one or group/peer) from outside of the organisation

Personal reflection

This is informal and the option to pick if you wish to record any personal reflections from any kind of clinical activity/professional activity you undertake. This isn't counted as formal supervision and does not count towards the once every 12 week expectation

If you select one-to-one clinical supervision or peer/group clinical supervision, you will then be prompted to select the approach to be taken: 

• Case supervision
• Structured reflection
• Evidence based learning
• Wellbeing support - this is informal and the option to select if you wish to capture the offer of post incident support of any kind. This isn't counted as formal supervision and does not count towards the once every 8 week expectation of formal clinical supervision.

As a supervisor you can facilitate the clinical supervision session using the approaches shared.

• FAQs

• Supervision training guide 

• Queries: paceandsupervsion@merseycare.nhs.uk

• Technical issues: contact your IT helpdesk

Any line management supervision you carry out should be recorded on the Supervision system to confirm this has taken place and capture any discussion points or actions. It is the line manager's responsibility to record the session.

The expectation is that all staff should have a line management supervision session or one-to-one at least once every eight weeks.

The supervision dashboard is now live. You can also access this from the general reports section of the Reports area of the BI Hub.

The dashboard has been reviewed and tested extensively by operational leads across all divisions, with help and support from their lead performance business partners.

The main focus of this dashboard is clinical supervision. This can be accessed by selecting the ‘Clinical Supervision’ button from the dashboard navigation panel at the bottom left of the welcome screen.

Further information

During testing a number of data quality issues were identified that resulted in staff members appearing not to have had clinical supervisiony.

Most of these issues were due to the following:

1. The staff member did not have a PACE Profile.
2. The staff member had an incorrect, or old employee number recorded against them within their PACE Profile.

The dashboard displays the correct employee number for all staff directly from ESR, this can easily be checked against your PACE Profile.

If the information is incorrect, this can be updated by clicking the ‘edit profile’ button. If you identify incorrect information, please check this in the first instance and update accordingly.

The dashboard updates daily at 3am, so any changes will be reflected the next day.

The dashboard runs as at the end of the current month, this allows you to plan for the supervisions you need to undertake before the end of the month and this is in line with previous reporting.

If you have any issues or queries with the report, please log a job on the BI Hub, selecting ‘Log an Issue or 'Query with an Existing Report’ as the type of request and someone from the team will help you out.