Clinical psychologists’ experience of cultivating reflective practice in trainee clinical psychologists during supervision: a qualitative study

Abstract

Reflective practice is regarded as an essential competency to maintain high clinical standards by various professional bodies and is therefore emphasised within healthcare training programmes including Clinical Psychology. Clinical supervision is seen as the most common and useful way to encourage reflective practice in healthcare professionals but there is limited evidence on effective strategies for its development. Given this, this research aims to investigate the experience of clinical psychologist supervisors’ in developing reflective skills in trainee clinical psychologists. Six themes have been derived by using thematic analysis and the findings are discussed along with implications and future research directions.