Introduction to the special section: Supervision in publicly funded settings: Best practices.

Abstract

Supervision of trainee and early career psychologists is the epitome of clinical skill cultivation and mentorship of knowledge passed from an experienced professional supervisor to supervisee. However, supervision is not only a “one-way street” as it has been traditionally regarded. Rather, the supervisor–supervisee dynamic is variable, ranging from didactic, to symbiotic, to everything in between. Our collection of articles explores the various forms of clinical supervision in publicly funded settings. They include integrating three low burden multicomponent supervision approaches, a Primary Care Behavioral Health (PCBH) model (Ogbeide et al., 2023), metacognitive reflection and insight therapy, use of an Adlerian-informed supervision method that integrates the Respectfully Curious Inquiry/Therapeutic Encouragement (RCI/TE) framework, and Heron’s Six Category Intervention Framework (Hamm et al., 2023; McCarty et al., 2023; McMahon et al., 2023; Schriger et al., 2023). Furthermore, this special section applies to various demographics of supervisees, clients, and supervisee–client dyads including the military culture setting, youth with publicly funded insurance, clients with psychosis, trainees with disabilities, and frontline staff at nonprofit organizations (Dawson & Chunga, 2023; Hamm et al., 2023; Reddy et al., 2023; Schriger et al., 2023; Wilbur et al., 2023). Barriers tackled include administrative and fiscal challenges, reduced availability of supervisors, and burnout in highly traumatized environments (Dawson & Chunga, 2023; McCarty et al., 2023; Schriger et al., 2023). Finally, these diverse clinical frameworks of distinct supervisor–supervisee–client pairings foster increasing feelings of connection, clinical competence, disability-affirmative training environments, supervisee self-awareness and self-efficacy, and increased antiracism in supervision (McCarty et al., 2023; McDonald et al., 2023; Wilbur et al., 2023).