Supervising across professions: insights into the art of interprofessional clinical supervision

Implementing interprofessional education in clinical settings is a complex but essential undertaking for preparing health professionals for collaborative practice. In interprofessional training wards, students from multiple professions learn with, from, and about each other while providing patient care together. Supervisors are pivotal to this process, yet supervising across professional boundaries introduces challenges that remain underexplored. This study explored how supervisors from different health professions conceptualise and enact interprofessional supervision in interprofessional training wards.

This qualitative exploratory study involved interviews with 16 supervisors (nurses, physicians, physiotherapists and occupational therapists) from four interprofessional training wards in Sweden. Purposeful sampling ensured a diverse sample. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.

Three themes were developed: learning to swim in uncharted waters, navigating tensions between profession-specific and interprofessional supervision, and "just call the nurse": the unchosen responsibility and unbalanced leadership of nurses. Across professions, supervisors reported entering interprofessional supervision with little preparation and relying on learning by doing. They described continuously negotiating their supervisory roles while balancing profession-specific expertise with interprofessional goals, relying on improvisation in practice. Nurses' continuous presence positioned them as central coordinators of student teams, but this role was demanding and under-recognised. Collectively, the findings highlight interprofessional supervision as improvised, negotiated, and unevenly distributed.

Interprofessional supervision is a distinct but under-supported pedagogical practice embedded in everyday clinical work and shaped by individual, organisational, and structural factors. Without clear frameworks and institutional support, supervisory responsibilities risk being unevenly shouldered. Our findings underscore the need to move interprofessional supervision from tacit improvisation to intentional, shared practice. Investing in supervisor preparation, shared pedagogical frameworks and organisational support is essential for sustaining high-quality interprofessional learning in clinical training wards.

Not applicable. This is a qualitative study and not a clinical trial.