The use of images as an arts based intervention to promote therapeutic approaches to social work supervision

As a global professional social work faces common challenges in supporting its workforce, one of which is the prevention of practitioner stress and burnout. This has been consistently documented within the professional literature given the potential traumatic impact of the work not only on the health and wellbeing of individual practitioners, but on their organisations and ultimately on the quality of support offered to users of social work services. It is timely to find effective short term and self-regulatory methods of stress reduction requiring short/simple training for professionals to use in their supervision practice to promote contemplative processess of learning and strengthening to integration of different cultural perspectives. This presentation shared the outcomes of a British Academy sponsored collaborative project between social work educators in the UK and Israel which capitalized on emerging knowledge about the impact of arts based interventions within social work. Through a series of developmental workshops in both sites with practice educators and key professionals involved in social work supervision practice, we have been working to bridge gaps in traditional support for ongoing stress reduction in already overburdened bureaucracies. Working with guided imagery, we have sought to develop common tools and learning materials useful in the supervision context and transferable to different international contexts which can also be easily accessed from a web-based source. Our presentation drew on a specific and comprehensive review of the literature on arts based approaches within supervision practice from which we then critically reviewed the developmental process taken as well as providing a demonstration of the tools we developed. We conclude with a short evaluation of the impact of using imagery in social work supervision based on this initial pilot.

NA is already available on the web portal of conference webpage