Supervision in Interprofessional Education: Benefits, Challenges, and Lessons Learned

As interprofessional teamwork and collaboration in health care becomes a larger component of a psychologist's role, there is a growing need for training and supervision in this competency area. The interprofessional education (IPE) at Memorial University of Newfoundland provides psychology doctoral students with didactic and experiential training in collaborative practice supervised by a practitioner from another discipline. The cross-disciplinary supervision provided in IPE is associated with a unique supervisory experience, in which supervision of the interprofessional competency occurs in a group with students from other disciplines, and the supervisor-supervisee relationship is less clearly defined as compared with typical psychologist-trainee supervision. In this paper, three doctoral students involved in the Memorial IPE training will discuss their experiences with supervision in IPE, highlighting benefits and challenges of cross-disciplinary supervision, and applications of the IPE training in a clinical setting. While there are a number of differences and challenges associated with the supervision received by the three students in IPE, this training has been found to be useful preparation for working on interprofessional teams and gaining insight and appreciation into the roles of various professionals on health care teams.