Yale Program on Supervision

The mission of this Yale Program is to strengthen the supervision of health and human services in order to enhance quality of care, organizational effectiveness, and the work life and careers of employees.

The Yale Program on Supervision is part of the Yale School of Medicine and its Department of Psychiatry. It operates under the direction of Yale Faculty members who are national and international leaders on workforce development in healthcare. The Program provides a diverse range of services. These include: skills training with supervisors and middle managers; staff coaching; strategic planning and consultation with agency leaders on organizational change strategies to foster effective supervision; supervision policy and standards development; and specialized training and consultation addressing secondary trauma in the health and social service workforce.

The Program’s faculty members have created a Yale Model for training supervisors and shaping supervision practice in public and health and human service organizations. The Program’s faculty members have delivered training and consultation nationally and internationally to a broad array of organizations in the fields of adult and child mental health, addictions, child welfare, juvenile justice, adult corrections, and correctional mental health. The Yale Model has been applied in diverse types and levels of care that range from secure inpatient and locked correctional settings to community-based programming. The model emphasizes an Informed Consent approach to engaging staff members in supervision. It is built around four core supervisory functions, which include: quality of care, administration, support, and the professional development of supervisees.

Our customers, including agency leaders and supervisors, have consistently given high ratings to both the training and consultation. Members of the Yale faculty who specialize in outcomes research and program evaluation are available to assess the impact of training and organizational consultation on supervision. Evaluation findings from past efforts have demonstrated the impact of the training on supervisors.

The Yale Program on Supervision benefits from the guidance of an International Advisory Board whose members are widely recognized as leading experts on the subject of supervision.

This peer-reviewed publication from the Yale Program on Supervision is an article on our comprehensive approach to improving supervision through organizational consultation and staff development, with a focus on evidence-based practices. The article appeared in the Clinical Social Work Journal, 42; 171-181, 2014.

Abstract: The last few decades have witnessed major growth in the evidence base on effective client interventions used by social workers and other health and social service professionals. As the pressure for service agencies to offer empirically supported treatments has been increasing, financial and time constraints have driven a decline in the frequency and amount of supervision provided within many of these organizations. While the reduction in staff supervision presents a challenge for effective implementation of all treatments, there are comprehensive empirically supported treatment models for clients that serve as exemplars of supervisory practice through their explicit requirements, processes and tools for supervision and supervisor development. After a review of the current status of supervision nationally, an implementation science-based approach is described, which builds organizational support for supervision and promotes optimal supervisory practice through training and consultation of supervisors and supervisees. The elements of this comprehensive approach, developed by the Yale Program on Supervision, are detailed. Supervisory policies, practices, and tools created by the developers of empirically supported treatments and similarly grounded in the principles of implementation science are offered as further examples of strategies for ensuring effective supervision.