Developing a provisional standard for clinical supervision in nursing and health visiting: the methodological trail

The authors outline the process that led to the development of a provisional professional standard for clinical supervision, focusing on design, data collection, and analysis methods. The work was undertaken in an ethos of new paradigm/fifth-generation approaches and used the "manifold of subjective knowing" to gain a holistic understanding of supervisors' experience as represented by experiential, presentational, propositional, and practical knowing. They show how they arrived at the indicators of the standard: Professional Support, Learning, and Accountability. Each of these indicators consists of further elements related to Time, Environment, Relationship (Professional Support), Focus, Knowledge, Interventions (Learning), Organizational Support, Recording, and Competency (Accountability). Findings confirm that clinical supervision practice is complex, and the authors describe proportionally complex methods of analysis.