Show Notes

Clinical supervision is an ethical requirement for therapists, yet finding a clinical supervisor can sometimes be a task all of itself. Due to the limited number of therapists providing clinical supervision, there’s a shortage of clinical supervisors, specifically those who provide a for-fee service.

Therapists in private practice often seek out for-fee clinical supervisors, as they usually don’t have access to clinical supervisors, unlike therapists who work in agency settings. So therapists in private practice are often on the hunt for clinical supervisors and willing to pay out of pocket to do so.

So, if you’ve been considering becoming a clinical supervisor, there’s never been a better time.

In this short episode, I’ll explain why you should add clinical supervision to your service offerings.

What is Clinical Supervision

So, first let’s define what clinical supervision is. According to the Canadian Association of Social Workers, clinical supervision, and I quote, “focuses attention on the client-practitioner relationship” (n.d.) The National Association of Social Workers (2013) breaks down clinical supervision into three pillars that often overlap in practice, administrative, educational, and supportive supervision.

Administrative supervision primarily focuses on managing the business side of private practice, which includes supporting a supervisee with organizational policies, administrative functions of the private practice, and how to do it all ethically.

Educational supervision, which is the most common type of clinical supervision that therapists think of when they work with a clinical supervisor, is supervision that focuses on giving professional advice to help the supervisee manage specific client cases and have discussions regarding ethical dilemmas, while also providing guidance with the application of the therapists’, standard of practice and code of ethics.

And the third is supportive supervision. Supportive supervision is supervision that provides supervisees a safe place to discuss, navigate, and process challenges they face within their work and practice that may be directly or indirectly connected to client work. This may include processing feelings regarding a specific client situation and navigating practice burnout. Although in providing supportive supervision, it’s important to develop clear guidelines and boundaries for yourself.

How to Become a Clinical Supervisor

You might also be wondering do you have the educational requirements or skills to become a clinical supervisor? This often stops many therapists from being a clinical supervisor as they don’t feel that they have the educational requirements or skills.

But it really depends on the criteria set out by your regulatory body, and or the regulatory body of your supervisee. Who can become a clinical supervisor depends on the profession, the jurisdiction, skills, experience, training, and overall expertise of the prospective clinical supervisor.

As clinical practice is often regulated by profession and by province or state, each regulatory body has its own rules, regulations, and standards when it comes to credentialing clinical supervisors.

Some regulatory bodies have more of an autonomous approach to credentialing, where the supervisor can assess their own scope of practice for providing clinical supervision, whereas other regulatory bodies have stricter criteria about who can become a clinical supervisor.

Some regulatory bodies require clinical supervision training, passing an exam, a self-assessment of one’s skills and knowledge, the specific number of years in practice in order to become a supervisor. So, it’s important to know what it is you need for your specific regulatory body.

Some therapists even provide cross-profession or cross-jurisdictional clinical supervision where they provide supervision to therapists in other professions or regulatory bodies across jurisdictions.

As becoming a therapist can take many routes, such as being a social worker, psychologist, psychotherapist, to name a few, the clinical supervisor may decide that they want to provide clinical supervision to a therapist from another profession, or a therapist in the same profession but in a different province or state.

However, if you’re considering providing cross-profession or cross-jurisdictional clinical supervision, you’ll want to ensure that one, it’s within your scope of practice, two, that you have met the criteria to be a clinical supervisor for the supervisee’s regulatory body, and three, that your practice insurance covers you if you work across professional or jurisdictional lines.

Why Become a Clinical Supervisor

So, why should you become a clinical supervisor?

Well, there are many benefits of becoming a clinical supervisor that range from furthering your profession to increasing your income. But I think the biggest reason that fits within most of the benefits is filling a shortage for clinical supervisors.

As I mentioned in my introduction, the demand to supply for therapists to clinical supervisors in some areas is more towards the demand side for clinical supervisors. As more and more therapists are going into private practice, there’s more of a need for fee clinical supervisors.

But typically, clinical supervisors only have a few hours a week to provide clinical supervision as they tend to have a full-time job, whether in private practice or as an employee in an agency. So, if you become a clinical supervisor, you can help further your profession, enhance client care through provision of clinical supervision, and add additional income stream to your practice while doing so.

Group Clinical Supervision

Now, if you’re like most clinical supervisors, you’re probably going to provide clinical supervision on a part time basis while you run your own private practice. So, you’ll have limited time and availability to provide clinical supervision.

A great way to increase your earning potential while supporting more therapists is by providing group clinical supervision. Similar to becoming a clinical supervisor, some regulatory bodies have a criteria for the maximum number of supervisees that should be in a group supervision session, but typically supervision sessions can range anywhere from four to eight supervisees.

Group supervision is a great way to narrow the shortage gap, supervise more therapists, and make additional revenue all at the same time.

And the beauty of providing groups, whether clinical or therapy, is that you can charge less but make more.

Let’s just say that you charge $150 for a one-hour individual clinical supervision session, and you charge $90 per person, per group clinical supervision session. Even if you conduct a two-hour group clinical supervision session, you can make a profit.

For example, if you conduct a two-hour group supervision session to six people, that’s a total of $540. But two one-hour individual clinical supervision sessions would be a total of $300. So, you’ll make 240 more dollars by providing a two-hour group supervision session at a lower rate per person than you would if you conducted two one hour individual sessions at a higher rate.

So, with group clinical supervision, you make clinical supervision more accessible for therapists just starting out in private practice, while also increasing your earning potential while doing so. Really? I don’t know why more clinical supervisors don’t provide groups for this very reason.

But of course, group supervision has its pros and its cons as well. One of the biggest pros is that supervisees have access to ethical dilemmas or situations from other supervisees that they may not have even thought of or experienced yet. So, they can learn how to manage or navigate such situations before they come across it. But one of the biggest cons for group supervision is that supervisees won’t get the same one to one attention and support that individual sessions would provide.

Clinical Supervision Course

As I had mentioned before, some regulatory bodies require clinical supervisors to take clinical supervision trainings prior to credentialing them as a clinical supervisor. Some regulatory bodies have their own clinical trainings while others allow prospective clinical supervisors to take a course of their choice.

Whether you’re required to take a course or you want to build your confidence with the supervisory process, PESI offers a great clinical supervision course called Clinical Supervision Success.

If you’d like to check it out, go to kayladas.com/pesiclinicalsupervisiontraining.

That’s kayladas.com/pesiclinicalsupervisiontraining.

Or you can simply scroll down to the show notes and click on the link.

Conclusion

Thank you for tuning into today’s episode. If you liked this episode or the designer practice podcast overall, and you’re listening to the podcast on a major podcasting platform, I would love if you could take a few moments to leave a comment or a review.

Until next time, bye for now.

Credits & Disclaimers

The Designer Practice Podcast and Evaspare Inc. has an affiliate and/or sponsorship relationship for advertisements in our podcast episodes. We receive commission or monetary compensation, at no extra cost to you, when you use our promotional codes and/or check out advertisement links.

References

Canadian Association of Social Workers (n.d). 7.3 Clinical Supervision. Retrieved from https://www.casw-acts.ca/en/73-clinical-supervision

National Association of Social Workers. (2013). Best Practice Standards in Social Work Supervision. Retrieved from https://www.socialworkers.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=GBrLbl4BuwI%3D&portalid=0