Behavioral health (BH) clinicians who provide clinical supervision often lack formal training for primary care settings, and there is little formal support in their practice settings, which can lead to isolation. There is not yet a uniform approach to providing professional development in primary care supervision. In one of my latest publications in The Clinical Teacher, I share findings from our work that aims to improve that process, by enhancing training and connection among behavioral health supervisors working with trainees in primary care settings. Between 2017 and 2021, we conducted a series of trainings using a Community of Practices (CoP) model to provide professional development training to BH supervisors in primary care settings. We used a collective knowledge creation approach to encourage collaborative learning across 13 focused workshops, each of which addressed key topics related to clinical supervision of pre-licensure level BH trainees within the Primary Care Behavioral Health (PCBH) model.
While the PCBH model of care is gaining popularity, it provides challenges for participating BH clinicians, who are oftentimes learning to provide care in a new delivery setting while also being asked to supervise pre-licensure trainees. To support this critical component of the workforce, we tried to determine if the CoP model would provide a feasible and structured approach to support these BH supervisors and improve the supervision of trainees in the primary care setting. Our findings from this small trial were positive. Participating supervisors indicated improvements in their confidence with providing supervision to trainees. These findings demonstrate that this collaborative group format (in person or virtual) is a feasible approach to building BH supervisor confidence in working with trainees in primary care settings.
These findings are useful for other institutions, such as higher education and health care organizations, which can adopt this approach in their own settings to expand professional development opportunities to BH supervisors in primary care. For more details on our methods, interpretations and implications of this work, we invite you to read the full report here.
Photo by Meghan Holmes on Unsplash
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