Roles and Responsibilities of a named Clinical Supervisor
Clinical supervisors are vital in guiding and supporting trainees as they acquire knowledge and skills in their clinical roles in the NHS. A good CS is knowledgeable and clinically skilled in their field, supportive of their trainee, committed to the supervisory role and has good listening skills https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10499229/ and is in a position to profoundly enhance their trainee’s experience of the clinical environment they are working in.
Named clinical supervisors have responsibilities as set out in the Medical Education Leaders UK job description “named clinical supervisor” (see link below).
All CSs should have adequate time in their job plans to fulfil their roles which is 0.25PA in total regardless of the number of trainees (to a maximum of 1PA in total for ES and named CS roles).
Clinical Supervisor – Appraisal Requirements
Recognition as a named CS
Before starting as a named CS you should:
1. Ensure that you have the generic professional competences required by your royal college to do this role. With the new curricula across all royal colleges now coming into practice, all doctors wishing to achieve CCT or CESR will need to demonstrate the generic professional competences required to act as a named CS so all new consultants will have done this. SAS doctors wishing to be named CSs will need to check the relevant royal college curriculum for their specialty and discuss with the local LFG lead whether there is any specific extra training required.
2. Have the role as named CS clearly documented in your job plan (0.25PA for the role of CS regardless of number of CS trainees you supervise) and agreed in your annual PDP
3. Complete the module ‘supporting educational and clinical supervisors’ in module 1 of the Educator Training Resource on the e-lfh website www.e-lfh.org.uk . You can sign up for access to all the modules on this site with an nhs.net email address. On the homepage look for ‘My elearning’ and click on ‘view full catalogue’ to find the module.
4. Consider whether you will be supervising GP trainees or foundation doctors as a named CS in secondary care: if so please look through the educator training resource and complete those ones relevant to your trainee’s educational needs.
5. Access the Educator Training Resources at www.e-lfh.org.uk – they are all excellent but as a minimum you should complete those on supervision, assessing educational needs, setting learning objectives, effective feedback and supporting learners, plus modules from part 3 of this resource as you feel appropriate to you and your trainee.
6. Ensure you are up to date with your E+D training (also available on e-lfh) which needs to be completed every 3 years.
Appraisal Requirements for Clinical Supervisors
1. You should read this advice in conjunction with any published guidance that your Trust has on this subject.
2. Your role as CS should be discussed at each annual appraisal as part of your scope of work and should have protected time in your job plan.
3. Every 5 year revalidation cycle you need to demonstrate that you have undertaken CPD that covers domains 1-4 and 7 of the GMC standards for trainers as set out in the HEE Framework for Educators document 2022 (available at https://london.hee.nhs.uk/sites/default/files/professional_development_framework_for_educators_2022.pdf ). Your Trust appraisal documentation may have suggestions embedded as to what CPD can be considered for each domain but this information is also available on page 17 of the professional development framework for educators. CS update training opportunities are available via your Trust, School or royal college as well. We have not set a minimum amount of CPD, but you should consider what is necessary for you to remain up to date in this role.
4. You should remain up to date with your equality and diversity training which is available via your Trust or the e-lfh website.
Please note if you do not update and provide this evidence to your organisation, you should not act as a named clinical supervisor.
5. Just as in regular appraisal we undertake a feedback exercise from our patients every 5 years, it is good practice to do the same for educational roles. There is a free tool available to help you seek anonymised feedback from your trainees which you can sign up for at https://supervisormsf.hee.nhs.uk (this works for KSS as well as London) and we would encourage you to participate in this as part of educational CPD.