Supervision for counsellors and social workers

With increasing demands on social workers and counsellors, changes in the systems we work within and increased shifts with moves for mandatory registration, supervision has never been more important. Often, we get many last-minute calls from people seeking supervision due to not meeting their hours. Supervision can serve many purposes and functions within counselling and social work.

For those in private practice, this is essential. Supervision can support building your practice from the ground up, looking at managing complex cases, improving business management processes and ensuring notes are done well with implementing self-care between all this. Another important aspect of private practice is also connecting to others and gaining ongoing client referrals.

For those in government or not for profit sector, as well as private practice it is also important to have a supervisor across the different child protection laws, NDIS rules around restrictive practices and improving practice proficiency in the different tools you use with clients. Riverina Counselling is able to provide all the above, having moved 2 private practices over the years and sustained them, as well as having worked across different sites as a clinical lead, being versed in the different aspects of child protection legislation and NDIS domains.

An important aspect of supervision is helping new and seasoned therapists develop reflective practice in their work, as well as ‘praxis’ in brining theory and practice together. For those in more regional Australia such as Cowra, Wagga, Orange or even further west than Dubbo, accessing supervision via remote means has never been easier.

It can also help finding a supervisor based in more regional Australia if you are remotely working, as there are differences in regional and remote Australia compared to cities, such as less services and more difficulties with social inequality. Having this supervisor with experience in managing difficult and ethical situations in remote communities can be a major asset, especially when navigating different child protection issues.

We recommend making contact to do a brief call before we commence, as like the therapy relationship, the supervisor and supervisee should be a good fit for one another. After this, we send a supervision contract out to be completed (this is paperless) which outlines the terms and conditions for ongoing supervision. You also need to consider finances and how often supervision needs to be. Many states the minimum is one month, however, we also get a number of supervisee’s who choose to also do weekly and fortnightly.