Guidelines for enhancing clinical supervision

Abstract

Clinical supervision is widely recognised as important and constructive in nursing and other health professions, but how is it actually done? All nurses, regardless of education, experience, or area of work, are encouraged to engage in the process of supervision, yet there is little practical guidance available as to how it should be done. The aim of this article is to firstly ascertain what professional nurses understood under the term ‘clinical supervision’ and secondly to provide guidelines for improving the process of supervision. Reflection helps one to understand the impact of one’s actions and improve one’s professional skills. It is therefore important for nurses and managers to develop a reflective approach to their work in order to make contextually appropriate changes when they are required in their professional practice. A qualitative, exploratory and descriptive research design was utilised where results from narrative sketches and literature control served as the basis for deducting and describing guidelines for enhancing reflection during the process of supervision. The conclusions drawn from the related findings are that the respondents know what clinical supervision encompasses but did not indicate the necessity of applying reflective learning during the process of clinical supervision.