Supervisors

For members who are Accredited Practitioners, supervision is an essential part of practice and key to our membership framework for this role. We have detailed the requirements for this and our rationale in our supervision guidance documents.

One of the more frequent questions we are asked is "Who would be a suitable supervisor?". This might be dependent on a member's professional background, for example an Occupational Therapist might want supervision from another OT who understands their training and practice. However, some members find that they get a lot out of being supervised by someone with a different professional background, who might challenge their thinking and approach in a different way.

Sometimes, it can be difficult to find someone appropriate who has both the appropriate professional background but also experience/understanding of working in a particular educational setting; and members have given examples of spending precious supervision time having to explain the context.

Further information about the topics above can be found in our supervision guidance.

Appropriate professional background

Although UMHAN believes that a supervision relationship is primarily a member's responsibility, we recommend that a supervisor should be a member of one of the following bodies:

• Association of Child Psychotherapists (ACP) - Full member. 
• The British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) - Accredited supervisor. 
• The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) -  Registered Supervisor
• British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC) 
• British Psychological Society (BPS) -Register of Applied Psychology Practice Supervisors
• British Association for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Supervision
• Counselling & Psychotherapy in Scotland (COSCA) –   Counselling Supervisor
• Federation of Drug and Alcohol Practitioners (FDAP) -  National Counsellor Accreditation Certificate (NCAC) 
• General Medical Council (GMC) -  Psychiatry – Full member or above.
• Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) -  Arts Therapist/ Occupational Therapist/ Practitioner Psychologist
• Social Work England
• Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (IACP) -  Registered Supervisor
• Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) -  Mental Health Nurse/ Community Mental Health Nurse / Psychiatric Nurse
• Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC)
• Social Care Wales (SCW)
• Northern Ireland Social Care Council (NISCC)
• UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) -  Full clinical individual member 
• Association of Christian Counsellors (UK) - Accredited Counsellor

Where a membership body listed above does not have a specific supervisor register, we suggest you use our guidance to formulate questions to ask potential supervisors and to draw up a supervision agreement. You can also use the Counselling Directory to search for qualified supervisors. 

If you are applying to become a new Accredited Practitioner member with UMHAN, you will need to have a supervision agreement in place to do so. Please contact the UMHAN office at [email protected] if you have problems finding someone appropriate as we can sometimes help identify supervisors through member recommendation.