Question
What is clinical supervision?
Answer
Clinical supervision is a style of social work supervision. Clinical supervision focuses on providing direct feedback on clinical concepts, such as theoretical knowledge, an assessment of the client or family or organization that the social worker is working with, thinking together about developing goals and treatment planning, selecting diagnoses, and thinking about which modality might be the best approach.
Clinical supervision sometimes takes on the air of the answer to the question of “what do I do now?” when the new social worker comes and says, "Okay, I tried this thing, what do I do now?"
Sometimes clinical supervision can be that place of setting direction for that next clinical step, it kind of paves a path, and puts the supervisor in a place to say, "we have walked this path five times now, you have a better expectation of what is coming than you did the first time you walked it, so tell me what you think we should do next?"
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the webinar, Foundations of Supervision in Social Work Practice, presented by Alison D. Peak, MSW, LCSW, IMH-E
