How do multidisciplinary clinicians in a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service and the trainee Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists who supervise them experience the supervision?

Supervision is a vast area of written and explored knowledge that has many differing schools of thought. Emphasis has always been placed on the importance of supervision as a teaching and learning tool; that it is delivered by a more experienced professional to another; and that the relationship and power dynamics within the supervisory collaboration have an effect on the successfulness of the supervision. This qualitative study uses Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to examine a psychoanalytically informed style of supervision delivered by a trainee to an experienced clinician working in an NHS Children’s and young people’s mental health service. The question of the trainee status of the supervisor in the supervisory relationship and the experience of being in this particular situation is the underlying focus of this study as it is perhaps quite unique to the training of psychotherapists within the NHS. However, consideration is also given to the experience of giving and receiving psychoanalytically informed supervision. The findings of this limited research suggest that the meaning of the supervision for each participant effects the experience, and that initially there is a distinction of meaning between trainees and supervisees but that over time these differences can become more inline; That the trainee status of the supervisor can have a direct effect at the beginning of the supervision on the power and responsibility of the experience; That the meaning of the supervision and the power dynamic relates to the collaboration and working relationship in the supervision; That there might be a constant and dynamic fluidity to the position and identity of an individual in the supervision space, effecting the development for both supervisee and supervisor; and that there is an overall effect of the supervision on each participant that is perhaps unique to this model of trainee led psychoanalytically informed supervision.