Clinical Supervisor Job Description, Skills, and Salary
Get to know about the duties, responsibilities, qualifications, and skills requirements of a clinical supervisor. Feel free to use our clinical supervisor job description template to produce your own. We also provide you with information about the salary you can earn as a clinical supervisor.
Who is a Clinical Supervisor?
A clinical supervisor is in charge of overseeing the day-to-day operations of a healthcare facility, including medical procedures and treatments administered by medical professionals and practitioners. Clinical supervisors collaborate with other healthcare providers to improve treatments, check patients’ health, and deliver medications. They also need employees to follow strict sanitary and hygienic practices. To discuss recommendations and analyze work practices in order to give the highest quality services to patients, a clinical supervisor must have an extensive understanding of the medical business.
Have you considered how satisfying it could be to help and mentor new psychotherapists? A clinical supervisor does this by supervising and evaluating psychologists and other practitioners who operate in a medical setting. As a supervisor, you’d enjoy not just helping, coaching, and motivating your clinical team, but also keeping track of their progress to assure the quality of the healthcare facility’s services.
You might supervise the work of less experienced clinical staff members as a clinical supervisor. You can also recruit, hire, train, and mentor clinical professionals to help them improve their abilities while maintaining high ethical and professional standards. To streamline the administrative operations of a medical facility, you can create programs, procedures, and policies. Normally, you’d spend the day walking from one location to the next, checking to see if everything is in working order. You’d also be expected to attend meetings to discuss and resolve any concerns that may be preventing the facility from operating efficiently.
Clinical Supervisor Job Description
Below are the clinical supervisor job description examples you can use to develop your resume or write a clinical supervisor job description for your employee. Employers can also use it to sieve out job seekers when choosing candidates for interviews.
The duties and responsibilities of a clinical supervisor include the following:
- Meeting with the governing board, department leaders, and practitioners on a regular basis.
- Observing and evaluating the work methods of practitioners.
- Motivating, disciplining, and counseling practitioners, as well as recommending more serious problems to top management.
- Performing performance evaluations.
- Assuring that practitioners meet the requirements for licensing and registration.
- Assuring clinical documentation compliance, accuracy, and quality.
- Supervising challenging cases to assist practitioners.
- Enhancing operations by providing adequate staffing and service accessibility.
- Creating programs and ensuring that procedures and policies are followed.
- Allowing trainees to learn by allowing them to handle patients in the framework of clinical governance and patient safety.
- Ensuring that clinical treatment is valued for the possibilities for learning it provides; learning and teaching must be integrated into service delivery.
- Providing regular, appropriate feedback according to the trainees’ stage and level of training, experience, and expected competence.
- Being knowledgeable about a variety of issues that affect a healthcare facility’s performance, including advances in diagnostic equipment, newly licensed pharmaceuticals, enhanced computer technology, new and revised government laws, and changes in health insurance policies.
- Attending interdepartmental meetings
- Identifying and communicating quality assurance and risk management issues to the appropriate managers.
- Monitoring resource utilization to identify when additional personnel is required.
- Inspecting the facility and making recommendations for building alterations or process adjustments to guarantee patient safety.
Qualifications
- A doctorate in psychology or a related subject is required.
- Licensure that is appropriate.
- Supervisory experience in a similar job for at least 5 years.
- MS Office Word and Excel are a plus.
- A valid driver’s license is required.
- Supervisory, service delivery, and case management fundamentals are all mastered.
- Applicable laws are well-understood.
- Strong interpersonal skills.
- Outstanding writing and verbal communication skills.
Essential Skills
- Problem-solving
In the business, good problem-solving abilities are essential.
Improved productivity and profit are the results of successful problem-solving.
A valuable supervisor is someone who not only understands how to investigate a problem and identify the source of the issue but also has a method for resolving the issue in a systematic manner. Supervisors who are good at fixing problems can be extremely beneficial to any company.
- Thinking Critically
Critical thinking is an important skill for knowing how to make decisions, solve problems, and stimulate innovation in a logical, strategic, and collaborative manner.
A supervisor with critical thinking abilities can devise a step-by-step procedure for identifying the problem and developing a solution.
Critical thinking is especially useful in instances where groups have varied thinking styles and need to build a collaborative environment in order to solve problems.
- Interpersonal Skills
Interpersonal skills are crucial for a supervisor to detect and establish a purposeful team culture within a business, but they are different from communication skills. Individuals with strong interpersonal skills may form highly effective teams based on consensus, productive meetings, and a thorough understanding of social styles and connections.
- Resolving Conflicts
When things change and people’s perspectives diverge, this is called conflict. Issues are resolved and good connections are established when a supervisor has the ability to effectively manage conflict.
The capacity of a supervisor to define and identify conflict styles, causes, and resolution procedures can boost the productivity of a department or company.
- Communication
Supervisors who have honed their communication skills might improve talks by employing listening techniques and nonverbal strategies. A supervisor’s ability to manage other personnel and projects while balancing time restrictions and a heavy workload is crucial. Supervisors with strong communication skills can provide powerful messages to their teams, whether it’s in the form of off-the-cuff banter or concise updates. It’s critical to keep your ideas focused and structured. Another area where excellent communication skills might help is giving and accepting feedback. Feedback can be used to reinforce or change behavior when the appropriate strategies are applied.
- Leadership
By providing a supportive and stimulating work environment, supervisors with leadership abilities assist in bringing accountability to their staff.
Leaders can distribute and manage a wide range of abilities. Supervisors must recognize where their teams’ strengths are, where growth is needed, and how to effectively leverage each team member’s skillsets in order to lead them in the most effective way possible.
- Documentation
When and how long the supervisor and supervisee meet must be adequately documented in order to show that clinical supervision is carried out according to the field of study’s guidelines. In addition, each time the parties meet, they must both sign a paper detailing how many counseling or patient care hours have been completed, as well as what was discussed at the meeting.
- Confidentiality
The supervisor-supervisee relationship is built on trust, thus it’s critical that the supervisor keeps what they’ve talked about a secret from the rest of the world. It’s crucial to remember that patient information and supervisee work are both protected by confidentiality. This contributes to the supervisee’s and supervisor’s trust in one another.
- Proper Time Management and Setting Priorities
Supervisors who are good at managing time and priorities can help their teams work more efficiently and productively. It’s critical to be able to manage and delegate other staff and projects while balancing a heavy workload and time limitations. Understanding what is urgent and what is important is great for supervisors. People who use effective management approaches are more productive, feel less stressed, get more done, have more energy, and have a higher self-image. Supervisors that are skilled in time and priority management are able to recognize variances in their employees’ time and priority management and adapt projects and workloads accordingly to ensure success.
- Consistency is a quality of a competent supervisor.
Supervisors that reschedule supervision sessions because they appear to be the least essential meeting of the week and can be easily rescheduled are my worst pet hate. It can be tough to schedule supervision on a regular basis in the therapy field. A smart supervisor will set out a consistent period with few distractions so that the hour can be dedicated entirely to your professional development as a therapist. Surveillance on the scene is also beneficial. However, it is critical that those periods do not replace or count as an hour of individualized supervision for your development. When a supervisor is unavailable for more than a week, another supervisor is assigned.
- Monitoring
The supervisor must oversee the supervisee’s work to verify that it is ethical and satisfies industry standards. During a typical supervision session, for example, the supervisee will present the treatment plan that they are following with their client and will then receive comments from the supervisor. The supervisor can then adjust the therapy if necessary and provide feedback to the supervisee so that they can improve in any areas where they need to.
How to Become a Clinical Supervisor
- Get a bachelor’s degree
A bachelor’s degree is the minimum requirement. A bachelor’s degree in psychology, social work, sociology, or a closely related field is required to work as a clinical supervisor. When it comes to learning how to become a Clinical Supervisor, picking the correct major is always crucial. Clinical Supervisors most typically receive Bachelor’s or Master’s Degrees, according to our data. Associate and Doctoral degrees are two other degrees that we frequently see on Clinical Supervisor resumes.
- Completing fieldwork or an internship is a good option.
You’ll probably be required to do an internship or supervised fieldwork as part of your undergraduate studies. This will be determined by the school you attend and the criteria for your individual degree. It’s possible that your previous work experience will assist you in becoming a Clinical Supervisor. Many Clinical Supervisor positions, for example, need prior experience as a Staff Nurse. Many Clinical Supervisors, on the other hand, have worked as Registered Nurses or Therapists in the past.
- A master’s degree is a great way to advance in your career.
After that, you’ll need a master’s degree in a related discipline like social work, psychology, or counseling.
- Complete a supervised practicum or a graduate internship.
You may be required to perform an internship or supervised practicum as part of your graduate study, depending on your program.
- Get your license.
The next step is to obtain a state-issued license. You’ll need a master’s degree and supervised clinical practice after graduation to get your licensure. This will be determined by your chosen field of study. You’ll require at least two years of supervised clinical experience as a licensed clinical social worker, for example. In addition, you must pass a clinical exam.
- Complete a Ph.D. program or obtain certification.
A postgraduate certificate or Ph.D. will be required if you want to work as a supervisor. States will have different certification standards. Approved Clinical Supervisor and Certified Clinical Supervisor of Career Counseling are two of the credentials that are available. In some fields, such as philosophy, you can earn a doctoral degree.
Where to Work
Clinical supervisors must focus on ensuring that patients receive the highest quality healthcare services possible, according to their job description. Hospitals, outpatient centers, skilled nursing facilities, clinics, and medical practices are all possible places for the supervisor to work.
- Hospitals
The clinical supervisor in a hospital will assist practitioners in assessing clients’ mental health, developing appropriate therapies, and referring them to appropriate resources. You’ll hire, train, evaluate, punish, and motivate your employees. At all times, you will guarantee that clinical documentation is of the highest quality.
To be successful in this position, you must demonstrate great leadership and make sound judgments in order to keep practitioners who can appropriately meet the therapeutic needs of clients. Top applicants will be well-organized, well-informed, and good communicators.
- Outpatient centers
The primary job of outpatient care supervisors is to plan, coordinate, direct, and supervise the performance of outpatient patient services. In larger facilities, supervisors normally handle a specific department or clinical area, but some may control the entire outpatient care center. Establishing facility objectives, ensuring compliance with government regulations, hiring new staff, initiating staff development programs, creating budgets, overseeing patient billing, devising shift schedules, resolving complex patient inquiries or issues, and evaluating clinical staff’s work are all examples of typical work responsibilities. Outpatient care supervisors may report to the facility’s president or CEO and attend board meetings on behalf of their department.
- Skilled Nursing centers
Clinical Supervisors in Nursing centers serve as a vital link between hospital administration and clinical care, overseeing patient care operations, assigning and monitoring staff nurses, and creating and executing quality improvement initiatives.
Registered nurses (RNs) in the post of nursing supervisor are ultimately accountable for healthcare teams and ensuring that a unit runs safely and smoothly.
Clinical Supervisor Salary Scale
As of, the average Clinical Supervisor pay in the United States was $74,673; however, salaries frequently range from $60,362 to $85,682. Salary ranges depend on various factors which include schooling, certifications, supplementary talents, and the number of years you’ve worked in your field.