5 Tips for How to Prepare for a Physiotherapy Supervision Session with your Mentor.
As a Physiotherapist, Supervision sessions with your Mentor are so important. Also, in today’s busy climate whether you work in the public or private sector, TIME with your Mentor is so precious.
It is so important that you both take time away from clinical work to focus on your professional development.
By being proactive and preparing for your Physiotherapy Supervision Session, you will be able to get the most value from your session, when you only have limited time.
Here are my 5 tips on How to best Prepare for your Physiotherapy Supervision Session with your Mentor:
5 Tips for How to Prepare for a Physiotherapy Supervision session with your Mentor:
1. Aim of Physiotherapy Supervision Session
2. How will your Supervision Session Align with your Objectives
3. Patient Caseload Focus
4. Topic Focus
5. Joint Review Focus
1. Aim of Physiotherapy Supervision Session
First you need to decide what your aim of the session is. What do you want to know after the session is over?
Are you noticing a repeating pattern of getting stuck with a particular patient group when communicating or treating? Are you having difficulty with a colleague and need a strategy to overcome the problem? Is there a topic you would like to know more about? Are you struggling with a specific handling technique?
Getting clear on what the aim of your session is will mean that you have better focus during your Physiotherapy Supervision session.
2. How will your Supervision Session Align with your Objectives?
The next thing to think about is how will the supervision session align with your objectives?
Is your objective to develop assessment and treatment skills for more complex patients? Or to develop leadership skills? Or to support a student placement?
If you can align the aim of your Physiotherapy Supervision Session with your overall objective, the documentation from your supervision session is one way of demonstrating that you are actively working towards the objective.
You should aim to keep your Supervision session to have 1 focus per session to avoid cramming too much in and not exploring each topic fully.
The next sections are different suggestions of how you can plan for your Physiotherapy Supervision Sessions.
3. Patient Caseload Focus
Discussions about your patient caseload are vitally important when developing your patient management skills. Having discussions about your assessment, clinical reasoning and treatment with someone who has more experience of managing the types of patients you have can provide you some much needed insight into how to maximise the impact of your assessment and treatment for your patients.
There are different ways you could decide what patients to bring to the session:
The patients that you feel out of your depth with, you don’t know if you have a solid clinically reasoned diagnosis and you aren’t sure how to manage them
A group of patients with similar characteristics that you find you get to a certain point in the treatment plan and then you get stuck. The patients may stop progressing or reduce engagement in their treatment plan. They could have the same condition or have similarities in other ways such as job, lifestyle, personality etc.
You should always come to your Supervision session prepared with 2-3 patients that you have in mind. This way you can maximise the time that you have with your supervisor.
Ways that you could keep track of which patient’s to bring to supervision are:
Keep a patient log which documents their condition, how many times you have seen them and add a note or highlight if you need to talk about them in your session.
Keep a log just of patients that you would like to bring to supervision to discuss.
Depending on your patient management system, there may be an option to put a ‘sticky note’ on their file (this is how we did it in the old days of paper notes).
4. Topic Focus
An alternate way to prepare for your supervision session is to have a focus on a specific condition or topic.
You could highlight that you have multiple patients with the same condition for example, achilles tendinopathy. You are able to get them to a certain point but then you find you are getting stuck at the same point, for example, you manage to get their pain to settle but everytime you try to get them to return to sport their pain increases significantly.
Once you highlight this you need to decide how you would like to discuss it. You could:
Review your notes to see common themes in your assessment or treatment options
Review the latest literature together and discuss how you can implement this into your practice (note. This may need some prior warning to your supervisor)
A practical session where you practice assessment techniques/ manual techniques/ explore exercise management/ communication techniques.
Joint Review Sessions
5. Joint Review Focus
Often it is best to have a joint review after you have already discussed the patient with your mentor. This avoids an unnecessary trip for the patient if it is not required to get the desired outcome for the patient.
Joint Reviews are useful for patients where you feel out of your depth or you are unsure on how to manage your patient from a communication point of view or from a movement pattern point of view. This is where your mentor with more patient experience can really be useful for you to observe how they manage the situation.
There are different types of Joint Review that you can do:
Watched assessment and treatment - your mentor watches you assess and/or treat a patient and provides feedback on what you did.
Joint assessment and treatment - you lead the session but your mentor chips in with observations re: movement patterns, techniques, handling tips etc
Senior Review - you watch your mentor assess and/or treat your patient and observe how they may manage the situation differently to you.
There is no right way to carry out a joint assessment and often each situation demands a different type of action plan.
The main aims are to be able to meet the patient’s expectations, view the patient holistically and increase your knowledge, skills and confidence in managing a situation.
Conclusion
There are so many options for you to explore to get the most out of your supervision session.
The worst thing you can do is not have anything prepared for your Physiotherapy Supervision session and that is because you are wasting the precious time you have with your mentor.
*Top Tips*
Have the 3 sets of notes ready for the patients you want to discuss
or
Read a paper on the topic you want to discuss
or
Look at the diaries and can see the next available slot you have together to book in a Joint Review
You will definitely get more out of the mentoring experience and your development as a clinician will increase more rapidly by following the Tips provided in this post.
DOWNLOAD THE SWOT ANALYSIS TEMPLATE
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DOWNLOAD THE SWOT ANALYSIS TEMPLATE 📢
If you need a little more help with where to focus your learning:
Make sure you download your SWOT ANALYSIS TEMPLATE.
Doing this exercise can focus your mind on the next steps for your personal development.
About the Blogger:
Hi, I’m Rebekah.
I’m a Physiotherapist with a passion to support others to get to where they want to be. I love to organise and plan which, comes in handy for my mission to empower others to achieve their Physiotherapy career goals.
