Clinical Supervision across Australia, Türkiye, Syria, and Bangladesh: From WEIRD to WONDERFUL

Clinical supervision in providing mental health and psychosocial support services (MHPSSs) is an ethical imperative and a key to ensuring quality of care in terms of service users’ skills enhancement, well-being, and satisfaction. However, humanitarian contexts in low-resource countries usually lack sufficient infrastructures to ensure staff have access to supervision. Against this backdrop, a pilot supervision program was introduced in Bangladesh and Syria to help MHPSS staff provide quality care. However, supervision provided by experts unfamiliar with these contexts decontextualizes the supervision process and hinders cultural relevance. The aim of this paper is to present a decolonial model of supervision called “WONDERFUL Supervision”.

WONDERFUL supervision has the potential to indigenize the concept of clinical supervision and thereby more sustainably and effectively ensure quality mental health care in resource-limited countries, especially in humanitarian contexts.