Supervision Skills

Delivering our client’s goals by reworking the brief with them.

The brief

The London Deanery (NHS London) came to us to create a training package to convey the complex and subtle communication techniques at the heart of the Deanery’s innovative approach to clinical supervision (which, in this context, is rather like professional mentoring).

These ‘supervision’ techniques have been designed to help healthcare professionals across the NHS find solutions to their most complex problems. The approach involves an open, circular and question-based approach between one healthcare professional and another.

The client initially asked us to deliver their learning points around real-life filmed supervision sessions – but our analysis demonstrated that real supervisions are so confidential that they would need drastic editing to be used – and then the conversational nature of the supervisions would be lost. So we proposed selecting real supervisions, minimally adapting them for anonymity, and then reconstructing them using professional actors.

And, with our clients full buy-in, that is exactly what we did.

New approach

We filmed these reconstructions (as we always do) using hugely experienced and talented professional crews and post-production experts – to create TV-quality video scenarios.

To support these real-life supervisions – and help viewers think through the issues raised – we also filmed supervision-style conversations between our two subject experts. And we created these learning-oriented clips as conversations between our experts, thus showing by example the open and questioning approach to supervision which we were recommending.

Finally, as per the client brief, we designed a really attractive and easy-to-use DVD-Video (including the interface, booklet and packaging).

The video supervisions are also web-ready, for client future client use.

Client feedback

“I am writing to say how delighted we are with the final version of the DVD… it has been beautifully produced, the quality is outstanding. I also wanted to say what a pleasure it was to work with you and your team. We really appreciated your expertise in advising what would work best in this medium, alongside your willingness to learn about our own field in order to produce the best possible DVD.”

Dr. Tim Swanwick, Director of Professional Development, London Deanery (NHS)