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Clinical supervision is widely accepted as being a good thing, but until now this has been more a statement of faith rather than fact. The Manchester Clinical Supervision Scale is designed to establish its true merits once and for all.
RECENT POLICY changes have highlighted the importance of clinical supervision (CS) for nurses. The most recent government report reinforcing the importance of CS on the policy agenda is Making a Difference (DoH 1999). In this document the government launched a wide ranging programme of measures to improve the NHS and the health of people in England.
In the chapter devoted to ways of enhancing the quality of care, clinical governance is seen as central to the plans for quality improvement. NHS organisations need to consider a number of issues that ensure plans respond to the development needs of nurses, midwives and health visitors. One of the key areas to address are plans for quality improvements which enable participation in clinical supervision and statutory midwifery supervision.
Participation in clinical supervision in an active way, therefore, should be seen as a clear demonstration of an individual exercising their responsibility under clinical governance (Butterworth and Woods 1999). Organisations now have a responsibility to ensure that individual clinicians have access to appropriate supervision and support in the exercise of their joint and individual responsibilities
With this endorsement of clinical supervision's established role in the working practices of the nursing workforce, effective evaluation of clinical supervision is one of the most important challenges which face nursing.
Evaluating clinical supervision
So far, published research has been limited to reports of the efficacy of clinical supervision in terms of increased satisfaction with the working environment (Begat 1997), or decreased levels of strain in nurses (Hallberg 1993). The links between these factors and the delivery of quality care remain tenuous. Several nursing researchers have shown that, for instance, clinical supervision can lead to improvements in personal growth (Paunonen 1991), increased satisfaction with nursing care and work (Hallberg et al 1994, Butterworth et al 1997) and decreased tedium and burnout (Berg et al 1994).
The debate about the methodological issues that surround the evaluation of clinical supervision has previously been raised by Butterworth et al (1996) in the report of the 23-site National...