Learnings and Challenges of Clinical Supervision from the Project Reconectando in Chile

Background and Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic crisis implied several challenges to social workers around the world. During the first months of the sanitary emergency, the government of Chile called the School of Social Work (SSW) at the Pontifical Catholic University to design and implement a program that provided support to hospitalized patients and their families in 21 hospitals at the Metropolitan Region. This challenge was faced through the Project Reconectando (Reconnecting). Reconectando hired about 70 practitioners (social workers and psychologists) who were allocated into the hospitals with the aim of assist families while their loved ones were hospitalized for COVID-19. Particularly in Chile, clinical social work is a specialization in incipient development during the last decade. Therefore, practices such as reflective supervision are barely known. In this context, the director of the SSW invited Faculty members to voluntarily participate in the design and implementation of Reconectando, and 11 clinical Faculty members offered to provide weekly clinical supervision to practitioners. The goal of the study was to analyze the learnings and challenges of the clinical supervision provided by SSW faculty members to practitioners in the context of the Reconectando.

Methods: This is a qualitative study following the grounded theory approach to analyze 29 clinical supervision sessions from 6 faculty members who volunteered to participate, and the written records of the sessions provided by them. Clinical supervision group sessions were provided online and recorded prior informed consent from practitioners and supervisors. The recorded sessions were transcribed to text. The analysis was conducted in the Software NVivo.

Results: Three main categories emerged from the analysis: Clinical supervisor’s approach, Goals of clinical supervision, and Type of case presented by supervisees. The former includes four subcategories, named: 1. Catharsis, contention, and strengthening.; 2. Reflective practice and problem resolution; 3. Normative and prescriptive; 4. Educative and pedagogic. The second includes three categories: 1. Emotional contention and catharsis; 2. Distention and relaxing; 3. Reflection about cases and practice. The later included three categories: 1. Difficult case solved; Difficult case and asking for help; 3. Difficult case without solution and emotionally affecting the supervisee.

Implications for practice: The style of the supervisors marks the clinical supervision provided and the goals of their supervision, independently of their professional profile, determining topics and relational interactions during the sessions. There are different conceptions regarding the goals of supervision, therefore, it is important to define goals regarding the approach of clinical supervisors in the context of social work, avoiding confusion.

Implications for policy: Clinical supervision is valued as a practice of emotional contention in the context of public health, which exceeds the pandemic context, and is crucial for clinical social work as a new field of specialization in Chile.

Implications for research: Future research should explore more in depth the different levels of reflective practice that we observed in Chilean supervision of social work. In addition, there is an opportunity to advance towards participatory action research that integrates the praxis with education.