Today the skip outside my house, which had been ordered by a neighbour and had stood in the street for three weeks, gradually being filled up beyond its capacity, and attracting the local children to play with its junk and scatter it around the pavement and on the road, was finally collected.
And it reminded me of clinical supervision.
Clinical supervision is a vital resource for nurses, but many nurses do not receive it often enough nor with sufficient quality. There is a wealth of literature and other research that emphasises the importance of clinical supervision. Organisations always include it in their documentation. But perhaps this is sometimes mostly a tick box exercise. All of us as nurses will know that what the organisation says and does are usually quite different things. Sometimes it seems that there is always time for us to read the latest worthy pronouncement by the organisation, or by the Department of Health, or to do the latest SWOT/PEST/INSECT (I made that last one up) analysis – but nurses get very little ‘me-time’. I find that keeping a reflective diary is essential for me to make sense of my practice experiences, but at the same time I also resent that I must do this in my own time that I could be spending with my family (or even asleep!).
To return to my analogy of the skip, then: imagine that as nurses all our experiences go into a skip and that clinical supervision is the process that removes them all and clears the space in the street for us to park our car (our practice). Underneath a line on the side of the skip are the words, “Fill only to this level”. The longer we leave it in the street the more filled it gets, and the higher above that safe level. It even gets filled up with rubbish brought by other people (experiences and issues not relevant to our practice); and then the local kids start mucking about with the contents and scatter it all about making a big cleaning up job for someone.
Regular clinical supervision stops the skip being filled above the safe level, clarifies our own practice, and is then taken away. The less we attend to our skip in the street, the more difficult it becomes to clear up the mess.
There are ways to ensure that nurses receive clinical supervision. Due to the amount of evidence of its benefits and advantages organisations cannot ignore ‘evidence’, an approach insisted upon the Department of Health. We can consult organisational policies on clinical supervision, IPDR and stress management, and dignity at work and remind our managers of the letter of them; and also use guidelines by the NMC (the regulatory body) and by the RCN (the professional body) to support our case.
If organisations want nurses to function as the deliverers of humanistic, holistic, compassionate care then they need to look after us. In order to empower others nurses need to feel empowered ourselves.
NB. This piece was rejected by the Nursing Standard in June 2006....
