Supervisors

About Supervision

For UMHAN 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 most 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 (OT) might want supervision from another OT who understands their training and practice. However, some members find that they get a lot from being supervised by someone with a different professional background, who might challenge their thinking and approach practice in a different way.

Sometimes it can be difficult to find someone appropriate who has the professional background but also the experience and/or 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 can be found in our supervision guidance documents.

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:

• ACC (Association of Christians in Counselling and Linked Professions) - Accredited Counsellor
• Addiction Professionals - National Counsellor Accreditation Certificate (NCAC)
• 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
• General Medical Council (GMC) - Psychiatry - Full member or above
• HCPC (Health and Care Professions Council) - Arts Therapist/Occupational Therapist/Practitioner Psychologist
• IACP (Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy) - Registered Supervisor
• NISCC (Northern Ireland Social Care Council)
• Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) - Mental Health Nurse/Community Mental Health Nurse/Psychiatric Nurse
• Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC)
• Social Care Wales (SCW)
• Social Work England
• UKCP (UK Council for Psychotherapy) - Full clinical individual member 

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 an Accredited Practitioner member with UMHAN, you will need to have a supervision agreement in place to do so. 

Please contact us if you have problems finding someone appropriate as we can help identify supervisors through member recommendation.