Supervision CEUs for Mental Health Professionals
3 Supervision CEU Courses to choose from:
All courses are online with instant certificates of completion.
All supervision CEU courses are accepted by the BBS and are APA approved for continuing education credit.
Ethical and Legal Dimensions of Supervision
In recent years, it has become generally accepted that supervision continuing education draws upon knowledge and skills that are different than, and go beyond, those of psychotherapy. Similarly, the ethics and legal imperatives regarding supervision both encompass psychotherapy issues and go beyond them. Furthermore, because supervision is a triadic rather than a dyadic relationship, the supervisor must always attend to the need for balance between the counseling needs of clients and the training needs of the counselor.
With the increase of litigation in American society over the past generation, ethics and law have become intermingled. It is important for the supervisor to remember, however, that ethics call the supervisor to a standard of practice sanctioned by the profession while legal statutes define a point beyond which a supervisor may be liable. For our purposes here, the functional interconnectedness between ethics and the law will be accepted.
Competence is an increasingly complex issue as mental health and supervision have become more sophisticated enterprises. Implications of both counselor competence and supervisor competence will be described here briefly.
Counselor Competence
By definition, a supervisee is a person who is not yet ready to practice independently. It is for this reason that supervisors are held responsible for what happens with clients being seen by the supervisee. At the same time, counselors must be challenged in order to become more expert. This, then, is the supervisor's CEUs tightrope: providing experiences that will stretch the counselor's ability without putting the client in danger or offering substandard care. Whenever a close call must be made, supervisors must remember that their obligation is to the client, the public, the profession, and the supervisee -- in that order. Therefore, the supervisor 15 Hour Clinical Supervision Course California, continually decides if the supervisee is good enough on a consistent basis to work with any particular client.
Supervisor Competence
First, the supervisors needs to know everything, and more, than is expected of the supervisee. Secondly, the supervisor must be expert in the process of supervision continuing education. It is not enough that clients are protected as a result of supervision; the contract between supervisor and supervisee dictates that supervision must ultimately result in better counseling skills for the supervisee. In order to accomplish this, it is generally accepted that the supervisor receive training in performance of supervision as well as supervision of supervision.
For both counselors and supervisors, any dual relationship is problematic if it increases the potential for exploitation or impairs professional objectivity. There has been greater divergence of opinion about what constitutes an inappropriate dual relationship between supervisor and counselor than between counselor and client. Ryder and Hepworth, 15 Hour Clinical Supervision Course California, for example, stated that dual relationships between supervisors and supervisees are endemic to many educational and work contexts. Most supervisors will, in fact, have more than one relationship with their supervisees (e.g., graduate assistant, co-author, co-facilitator). The key concepts remain "exploitation" and "objectivity." Supervisors must be diligent about avoiding any situation which puts a supervisee at risk for exploitation or increases the possibility that the supervisor will be less objective. It is crucial, however, that supervisors not be intimidated into hiding dual relationships because of rigid interpretations of ethical standards. The most dangerous of scenarios is the hidden relationship. Usually, a situation can be adjusted to protect all concerned parties if consultation is sought and there is an openness to making adjustments in supervisory relationships to benefit supervisee, supervisor and, most importantly, clients.
As part of the mandate of competence, 15 Hour Clinical Supervision Course California, the supervisor continuing education must determine not only if the supervisee has the knowledge and skill to be a good counselor, but if he or she is personally ready to take on clinical responsibility. The issue of personal readiness can lead the supervisor to blur the roles of supervisor and therapist in an attempt to keep the supervisee functional as a counselor. This is problematic for two reasons: (1) it compromises the objectivity of the supervisor, especially in terms of evaluation; (2) it may allow an impaired counselor to continue to practice at the risk of present and future clients.
