Professional supervision-a must!

Professional Supervision (PS): For me professional supervision is about sharing experiences and thoughts about difficulties or complex situations with someone who is trained to provide qualified advice on the “how to” work things through, see things differently and aid me in working out the solutions. It is not a winge session, a personal counselling service or a poor me session. It is semi structured and is aimed at enabling me to understand things in a meaningful way.

The importance of professional supervision through the transition from working as a rural nurse specialist, (as an employee) to NP – as an employee and then to NP and employer.  There have been mean reasons to seek professional support through this time. Sometimes arriving to PS with a topic at the forefront of my mind needing to be addressed, or a quick scan with the “how are things going?” question, and the ‘topic for today’ promptly declares itself! Without regular non biased discussions with a qualified professional supervisor I would have struggled to keep going in my quest to establish a NP owned and run General Practice.  Choosing to listen in order to hear, rather then listening in order to reply has been the most valuable lesson I have learned. Having my way of thinking challenged or at least being asked the ‘why’ question is challenging at times but always very enlightening as to how or why I may have come to a certain conclusion about something. I have been made aware of the complete “other way” of looking at or thinking about a scenario – often this brings a completely different potential outcome!

I have never left a PS session without feeling lighter, less stressed and with a way forward planned to address the ‘topic of the day’ or a level of peace that just saying some things out loud means they are free to go from ones mind.

I always reflect on and write about the discussions I’ve had in PS. This way I can clearly state what it was that warranted discussion in this forum (as opposed to something that I would discuss with family or  a friend) and then reaffirm the outcome of the session and maybe I will need to think about how to put in place any plans that ‘we’ have come up with.  I then know the way forward and how this will play out.