Supervision and mentoring: A call for clarity

Demi Germeroth, Sarah McMullen-Roach, Carolyn M Murray, Kobie Boshoff, Occupational Therapy Program, Allied Health and Human Performance, University of South Australia

Have you ever seen cilantro on a restaurant item, only to look it up and realise it is simply a different word for coriander? When a potential new occupational therapy staff member asks if they will receive supervision and mentoring in the role, is this a potential “cilantro” moment? Surely, they are the same thing?

Being confident about these terms and their application to practice is important for our profession. Using these terms interchangeably or simply combining them in a quick “supervision and mentoring” statement can create confusion. In 2022, we undertook a scoping review of the literature about mentorship in allied health and found that, while we understood what we wanted our definition of mentorship to include, the literature lacked clarity.

We first consolidated the differences, laid out in the below table (Doyle, Lachter & Jacobs, 2019; Speech Pathology Australia, cited in Speech Pathology Australia 2014, p. 5).

Inarguably, when used correctly and within context, both mentorship and supervision are powerful tools to support performance and career advancement. The benefits of supervision are widely researched and described in Occupational Therapy Australia’s Professional Supervision Framework OTA, 2019.

Professional supervision has been linked with enhanced work performance and problem-solving skills and is strongly endorsed by OTA (OTA, 2019). With just under half of the workforce currently below 35 years and the profession growing rapidly (Occupational Therapy Board Australia, 2022), there is an increasing imperative for supervision to ensure clinical competency, maintain performance standards and support wellbeing.

Mentorship is distinct from supervision because a key focus is career development, as well as participating in big picture conversations about both professional and personal goals. For mentoring to be successful, buy-in needs to be voluntary from both parties and conversations should be collaborative and not solely focused on clinical competency and operational activities.

Some issues associated with the current confusion of terms include:

• Occupational therapists claiming to offer supervision when they are offering mentorship (inadvertently misrepresenting their services)

• Occupational therapists claiming to offer mentorship but overstepping and providing supervision (inadvertently carrying responsibility for the competency of the mentee)

In an era of significant reform, there are incredible opportunities, but also risks of professional isolation and burnout that require adaptive and unique ways of supporting occupational therapists. This unsettled context provides a ripe niche for mentorship to develop communities of practice for mutual peer support and prepare the workforce for innovation. The reach and impact of mentorship is currently unknown, and this problem becomes accentuated when consistently confused and enmeshed with supervision.

As occupational therapists, we are very aware of the power of words – such as religion, ethnicity, culture, heritage and language – close but not identical; and when used incorrectly, may imply different things or be misunderstood. By focusing on using consistent and correct terminology, mentorship and supervision can co-exist and be used optimally for distinct but complementary purposes.

So, when a potential new occupational therapy staff member asks if they will receive supervision and mentorship in the role, is this a potential “cilantro” moment? No. Think of it more as a cilantro and parsley moment. On the surface mentorship and supervision look similar. Just as the true benefits of cilantro or parsley can only be experienced when paired with the right meal, the true benefits of mentorship or supervision can only be experienced when applied in the right context.