The Bridge Supervision Service for Professionals Supervision is provided by both adult and child and adolescent trained psychoanalytic psychotherapists who have consulted widely to professional networks. Who is the service for? The Bridge’s supervisory service offers both individual and group supervision to many different individuals and organisations including: 

• Leaders in organisations
• Teaching professionals
• Medical professionals
• Voluntary sector organisations
• Counsellors, Psychotherapists, Creative Arts Therapists
• Social Workers

 Supervision can: 

• Allow space and time to reflect on practice
• Contain and process the work
• Help to regulate stress levels involved in working in challenging environments
• A space to think about institutional and team dynamics
• Support with working within roles
• Facilitate communication between group members in large and small settings.
• Help contain difficult feelings brought up by working with vulnerable children and their families/adults
• Help one to understand the meaning of children’s behaviour
• Help one to understand more about children’s emotional development
• Provide a space to think psychodynamically about therapeutic work

  Medical and Nursing Professionals Working with people who are unwell or dying and their families can be extremely challenging on an emotional level due to the high levels of anxiety and distress that patients and family members as well as those caring for them can be experiencing.  There is often little time for these professionals to process the impact on themselves of working with patients.  Supervision can help by providing a safe, confidential and containing space in which people can express and think about the often strong feelings evoked by this work.   ‘(Supervision) provides an outside perspective to help one look at issues clearly and in different ways’ Clinical Nurse Specialist Teaching Professionals Most teachers find that a great deal of their time can be taken up dealing with challenging behaviour in the classroom.  They are often working with vulnerable children and families, sometimes from disadvantaged backgrounds.  Working with such children, especially those with challenging behaviour can often evoke strong feelings in teachers and staff.  Supervision is a space for teachers and other staff to process the emotional impact of their work.  It also offers an opportunity to think about children’s behaviour in terms of what it might be communicating and to explore together strategies and ideas that can help.  ‘I could not do this stressful job without supervision’ Learning Support Assistant ‘The supervision has been about supporting me to understand the meaning of staff’s behaviour and to manage difficult conversations’   Lead Teacher  Voluntary Sector Organisations Voluntary sector workers are often working on the front-line with people bringing complex and traumatic difficulties.   Supervision provides containment and a place to think about clients and cases with an experienced professional.   Counsellors,Psychotherapists, Creative Arts Therapists For most counsellors and psychotherapists supervision is an invaluable opportunity to present and discuss their work with another professional.  The role of supervision is to support the counsellor/therapist in their practice by providing a space to think about their work psychodynamically. Codes of Practice of all Counselling and Psychotherapy Organisations require their members to have regular supervision of their work.