In this episode I talk with Deanne Dale about trends in clinical supervision and her supervision practice.

In a lengthy career Deanne has worked as a frontline clinician, team leader, senior manager, consultant and educator in a range of NSW government and non-government organisations that respond to inter-personal violence, including child protection, sexual assault, domestic violence and workplace abuse.

Over the past 20 years Deanne has increasingly focussed on providing clinical supervision to social workers and other allied health professionals working in inter-personal violence services.

She now runs an independent practice ‘Social Work Wise’ www.socialworkwise.com offering clinical supervision to frontline workers as well as management coaching, training, policy consultancy and leadership mentoring. While Deanne has worked within current evidence based theoretical frameworks she is most interested in approaches that stay close to the foundational ethics of social work, including social justice ‘doing’, and respect for the inherent integrity and worth of each person. Deanne also does some teaching in Social Work Bachelors and Masters qualifying courses at a range of universities in NSW- as well as supervising students in field education.

Deanne’s approach to supervision, mentoring and coaching is based on developing a safe space in which to critically reflect on practice challenges and struggles. While she offers encouragement and support to assist workers to develop preferred professional identities, she does not shy away from candid, challenging and thought-provoking conversations. She is aware that each relationship is unique- and so tailors her style to her client’s needs, preferences, hopes and intentions.

Our conversation touches on Deanne’s social work career and her preferred approaches to supervision. We discuss her commitment to response based practice and the inspiration she find in the work of Vikki Reynolds. We also talk about the importance of separating clinical supervision from operational management and- importantly- how this relates to the discourse about burnout. Too often the talk around burnout involves the social worker being blamed for not looking after themselves -or for allowing a client’s distress to overwhelm them.

Deanne’s preferred approach is one of worker solidarity with a collective ethic of social justice. We need to connect with our communities for spiritual sustenance and our shared hopes for a fairer world.

 

Deanne provided the following links which will be of interest to listeners.

Response based practice:

https://www.responsebasedpractice.com/ (Allan Wade, Linda Coates, Cathy Richardson)

https://vikkireynolds.ca/  (Vikki Reynolds)

https://www.insightexchange.net/  (Domestic Violence Service management)

 

Narrative Therapy

https://dulwichcentre.com.au/

and Johnella Bird

https://www.johnellabird.nz/

In this episode I talk with Jack Whitney, an emerging social work leader, and current convenor of the NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby.

Jack graduated with first class honours from the University of Sydney in 2018. Whilst studying he was also elected onto the University of Sydney Union Board.

Since graduating, Jack has worked in Health, and currently for a progressive policy think tank.

In our conversation we explore the intersection of the personal and the political in gay politics.

Jack also reflects on the challenges of coming out in year eleven of high school, its impact on friends and family, and his subsequent evolution as a Labor Party activist.

We discuss the current campaign focus of the Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby – opposing the Religious Discrimination Bill in its current form. As Jack states on the Lobby website- There is no such thing as equality – but with exceptions… This Coalition Government cannot be trusted to introduce fair, measured and equal laws that protect LGBTI people, women, people with disability, and faith-based communities.”

We also discuss the poor mental health of the LGBTIQ community. Since we recorded the conversation Jack has had a heartfelt piece published in the Sydney Morning Herald, reflecting on the suicide of Will Gavin, the president of the disendorsed University of Queensland Liberal-National Club. He wrote in part,

I am a politically motivated – and progressive – gay man. There is little that Gavin and I would have agreed on. But his death gives us reason to pause. How do we create a civil society in which different opinions can co-exist? This is a question for the LGBT community as much as it is for broader society.

Perhaps the simple answer is the embrace of diversity. That includes gay people who happen to be conservative. If Gavin’s critics perceived him as intolerant, they should have confronted that with reason, not further intolerance, not fire with fire. The alienating and shaming of anyone isn’t helpful. 

Jack’s book recommendations are Matthew Todd’s Straight Jacket: How to Be Gay and Happy, Alan Downs’, The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World, and Rutger Bregman’s, Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There.

If you would like to make a donation to the Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby (GLRL) or contact Jack, you can find the details on the GLRL website.

From humble beginnings in the Royal Australian Navy, Suzanne Smith rose to a number of Naval Base leadership roles, being the Commanding Officer of HMAS Harman,  the Commanding Officer of HMAS Penguin, and Officer in Charge of the Royal Australian Naval College, succeeding in an era when discrimination against women was rife, both in the community and in the armed forces.

She then went on to be a senior public servant in Defence, ending her public service career as the Director of National Programs, delivering the National Family Support Service for Defence.

But Suzanne had always harboured the ambition to be a social worker- and she did just that- studying part time and also completing a masters of counselling and psychotherapy to complement her social work degree

Suzanne is now an Accredited Mental Health Social Worker, counsellor and trained teacher in Mindfulness and Self-Compassion. She specialises in the integration of mindfulness approaches to the treatment of trauma, PTSD, anxiety and depression.

Our conversation covers her Navy career, her thoughts about leadership and her passion for social work and psychotherapy.

I asked Suzanne for some book recommendations- and those are as follows;

‘Your Life Matters’ by Petrea King,

‘An Intelligent Life: A Practical Guide to Relationships, Intimacy and Self-Esteem’ by Julian Short,

‘An Authentic Life’ by Caroline Jones ‘Healing the Heart and Mind With Mindfulness’ by Malcolm Huxter,

‘The Miracle of Mindfulness’ by Thich Nhat Hahn,

‘Present Moment Wonderful Moment’ by Thich Nhat Hahn,

‘Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Love, Parent and Lead’ by Brene Brown,

‘Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life’ by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles,

‘The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living’ by the Dalai Lama.

Hilde Fiva Buzungu is both an anthropologist and an interpreter.  She is currently in Australia as a visiting PhD Research Fellow from Norway, writing up her research on social work with families where one or both parents have limited proficiency in the Norwegian language.

As a certified interpreter (Norwegian/English), Hilde brings a rich understanding to exploring the intersection between justice, migration, child welfare, social welfare, and intergenerational trauma and abuse.

Hilde was previously Senior Advisor at the Oslo University Hospital Interpreting Unit. This covered quality assurance of health care interpreting, research and development, recruitment and assessment of interpreters, interpreter ethics, and continuing professional development.

Her research findings were remarkable. In the Norwegian social welfare agencies working with migrant families, social workers went out of their way not to use interpreters. A key reason was often the inadequate quality, both in terms of language skills and interpreting skills on the part of the interpreter. This gave the majority of the social workers a deep, empirically founded distrust in the interpreting profession, and in the concept of interpreting as a solution in the face of language gaps. The Norwegian authorities do however require a higher quality of interpreter services in the areas of justice and health care.

Hilde and I talk about the implications of these findings, and what can be learnt from them.

Our conversation turns to exploring the narrow perspective of dominant monolingual cultures, the need for an interpreting profession, and the need for helping professionals to reflect the cultural diversity of their communities and their clients.

I also learn a little bit about the Sami, the indigenous peoples of Norway, particularly in relation to their need for good interpreter services and their struggles to avoid cultural genocide.

This conversation deepened my understanding of the ethical complexities, both for interpreters and social workers, of working in this space.

Social worker Norma Tracey is 80 years old and still working.

She is an important part of the history of hospital social work in Australia- but has also done much more. Her remarkable career began in 1960 as a Family Social Worker at the Australian Red Cross. From 1968 to 1977 she worked at the Institute of Child Health and the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children in Sydney

Her achievements included,

* publishing one of the first Australian social work papers on child abuse

* setting up special programs for failure to thrive infants

* establishing a hospital interpreter service

* running groups for depressed mothers with babies who with feeding or sleeping problems, and

* establishing the first multidisciplinary teams in many areas of the Children’s Hospital.

In 1978 she went into private practice, and for 30 years, was a senior member of the New South Wales Institute of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. She became one of their main lecturers in the training and supervision.

Norma has a lengthy list of publications related to working with trauma, and working psychoanalytically with parents and children.

In 2008, she co-founded Gunawirra, a not-for-profit organization made up of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal professionals. Gunawirra works with children aged 0 to 5 in 43 preschools in NSW, and runs the Aboriginal Young Families Centre in inner city Sydney.

Psychoanalytic theory and Aboriginal ways of working guide their programs. These programs pay special attention to early trauma in infancy and childhood, as well as severe adult trauma, where often, emotion can’t be experienced, pain can’t be suffered, and meaning is lost. Psychotherapy and group therapy offered to parents recognises the links between cultural destruction, the intergenerational cycle of trauma and individual pathology.

In pre-school programs, Aboriginal artists work alongside professional art therapists in helping children connect with their Indigenous culture, traditions, and ‘dreamtime stories’.

The topic of this podcast is supervision and how we can do it better. I talk with two expert educators in the field, Pam Cohen and Marie Heydon.

Pam Cohen was the senior staff supervisor at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney for many years, and now has a private practice at St Vincent’s Clinic, mainly with cardiac and pulmonary patients.

In addition to her clinical work, Pam is an expert in group work and the clinical supervision of Allied Health professionals.  She has taught courses in clinical supervision, group work and the psychosocial aspects of cardiac disease all over Australia.

Marie Heydon has extensive experience as a clinician, supervisor and educator in the health sector, including running individual and group supervision for staff and students. Marie currently works as a senior workforce development consultant in health. She also does consultancy work as an Authorised Visitor for the NSW Trustee and Guardian.

Together, Pam and Marie regularly present an in depth 4-day course on supervision for social workers, to further develop the supervision practice of participants. The course was originally devised by the renowned Sheila Truswell and Claire Bundey in the late 80’s – and through their  succession planning, continues to this day.

Our conversation explores the key issues covered in their course, including,

* What we mean by the term supervision

* Working with the power dynamics and power differentials in the supervisory relationship

* What the research tells us about the effectiveness of supervision

* Why supervision may be an antidote or preventative for burnout

* Working with differing learning styles

* How to give feedback that is both challenging and constructive

and

* How to improve the capacity for reflexive and reflective practice.

My guest on this podcast has lived most of her adult life in a small country town. But it wasn’t the life her parents had mapped out for her.

She was born into a prominent, conservative, Irish-Italian Catholic family in Melbourne. As the only daughter, she was expected to live close to her family – and, if a career outside family life was in prospect, it would ideally be in teaching or nursing.

This is the story of how Julianne ended up a long way from home: changed her career in midlife and became a powerful advocate, social worker and researcher in the field of palliative care.

She recounts how she came to establish a foundation to research, develop and fund rural end of life projects: Projects that truly delivered client and carer orientated, psychosocial, services.

As social workers we know that end of life care is much more than adequate pain relief, or when to withdraw active treatment- and it is also much more than a bucket list. It’s about meaning, values, and what it is to live a good life.

And so Julianne and I talk about the direction of palliative care research, the meaning of hope, professional politics and professional power in health care.

She describes her efforts to map out the best wholistic models of care and her continuing struggles against narrow more medicalised models of care.

My guest on this podcast is Kristen Holzapfel, and the subject of our conversation is a book she wrote entitled Selfless.

It is a story of Kristen’s work on the frontlines of social work- particularly in child protection.

After several years in a relentlessly fast paced environment she developed symptoms of vicarious trauma, which quickly led to the development of anorexia nervosa.

Kristen did her social work degree at ACU in Canberra, and one of her teachers and former Head of the School of Social Work, Kandie Allen-Kelly wrote the foreword to Kristen’s book.

In the foreword Kandie writes,

I met Kristen when she was a twenty-three-year-old social work student, she struck me as bright, lovely, idealistic, optimistic, warm, friendly and kind young woman… the quality of her writing and the honesty of her reflections, drew me into a world where I felt afraid, alone and angry that the profession had so badly let down one of our own…. Front line agencies not only deal with the toughest of societal issues and the worst cases of poverty abuse and violence. They are also subjected to high media scrutiny and repeated reviews and enquiries, all of which contribute to high levels of burnout, staff turnover and repeated failure to provide appropriate levels of professional supervision…

Selfless takes us in and out of Kristen’s recovery, reminding us that it is not a linear process, but one where survivors often revisit stresses and automatic behaviours which lead to downward spirals, and then back to new or different recovery paths. We come to understand or be reminded that vicarious trauma is “a process of change resulting from empathic engagement with trauma survivors” (Perlman 1999) and that shame – that deep sense of worthlessness and inadequacy – is deeply rooted within the development of such trauma. Kristen reminds us that vicarious trauma can be processed and worked through, but if we add another layer of stress (like workplace bullying or administrative ignorance) before it has been processed, psychological outcomes can become very shaky indeed.

For listeners who want to know more, or buy Kristen’s book, you can go to her website.

Adele Sheridan-Magro, my guest in this podcast, came to social work later in life. Her first degree in sociology was undertaken in her forties: specialising in women and gender studies. She was particularly taken by post-stucturalism, including the theorists Foucault, Lacan, and the feminist Helene Cixous.

In our conversation Adele described how she faced the challenges of using these perspectives in her social work degree and her subsequent clinical practice.

Adele now has extensive experience in the NGO sector as a specialist domestic violence counsellor, educator, trainer and service coordinator. She has presented on domestic violence at conferences both nationally and internationally,  including the  2015  European Conference on Domestic Violence, held in Belfast.

Adele points to the research that  now makes a compelling case for a direct link between women’s experience of  intimate partner violence and heightened rates of depression, trauma , and self-harm. Critically however, women who are victims of  intimate partner violence, consistently report poor treatment by mental health services. It is clear that the service paradigm is often unhelpful, and profoundly lacking in its recognition of the complex and multilayered trauma experienced by victims of intimate partner violence.

Adele makes the crucial point that communities will have a far greater chance of keeping a child safe if the mother is kept safe.

Our conversation turned to exploring ideas of love, where Adele has been very much influence by queer theory. We go on to discuss how rigid, stereotyped notions of love may carry within them the seeds of oppression.

Kim Hobbs has had a long career in oncology social work. She is now a clinical specialist social worker in gynaecological cancer at a large teaching hospital in western Sydney.

Building upon a solid base of clinical care, Kim advocates for improved psychosocial support services for all people with cancer and their families, friends and caregivers. She believes that psychosocial care should be a key component of comprehensive cancer care throughout treatment and recovery.

As a practitioner-researcher she has been involved in collaborative research projects, in psycho-oncology, including highlighting the needs of carers: demonstrating the power of group support: acknowledging and working with sexual issues: and understanding the qualities that leaders need in cancer support groups.

Kim believes that social work has important things to say about our contribution to psycho- oncology. She reminds us that social work caseloads reflect the marginalized and under-served: the disadvantaged, the poor: and the socially isolated.

Her research interests have led to several publications in international peer-reviewed journals, and she has authored and co-authored three chapters in two recently published Australian books.

Our conversation covers her clinical and research career in oncology as well as an illuminating visit to a palliative care service in Denmark.

Her message to medical leaders in the field has been simple; “you did the clever operation, we’re the ones who make their life worth living”.