Supervision on CLiP
CLiP supervision – what’s changing?
The introduction of the GOC’s Education and Training Requirements brings a number of changes to the guidance for supervision. New developments include:
- new roles are introduced: ‘Practice Educational Lead’ and ‘Task Supervisor’
- opportunities for newly-qualified registrants to become involved in supervision of specific tasks or areas, with guidance from an established Practice Lead
- scope for larger practices, or smaller practices working together, to create a team to support the student, with the allocation of supervisory tasks
- enhanced College support for all types of supervisor, including new training courses and the CLiP Portal, which will include logbook and risk framework tool
- new assessment framework for CLiP, with more focus on verification of student’s logged experience
Supervisor roles
To ensure students have a positive and structured learning experience, employers are responsible for putting the right supervision arrangements in place.
Each student will be supported by a Practice Educational Lead (Practice Lead) who oversees their progress and development in the workplace. Practice Leads are typically experienced supervisors, often with a background in supporting students through the Scheme for Registration.
If an optometrist who does not have experience supervising students wants to be a Practice Lead, they can arrange for an existing Practice Lead to mentor them in this role.
Where appropriate, the Practice Lead can share day-to-day supervision with one or more Practice Task Supervisors (Task Supervisor). Task Supervisors don’t need prior supervision experience - they might be newly qualified optometrists or professionals from related fields, but the Practice Lead needs to ensure that they supervise the student within their scope of practice.
All supervisors must be members of the College. Those who aren’t optometrists can join as Associate Members and will need to complete the relevant training to become College-approved for supervision on CLiP.
Everyone in a supervisory role will benefit from access to the CLiP Portal, College training, and ongoing support.
Supporting CLiP students
CLiP students will be recording daily activity in their CLiP Portal logbook, which all members of the supervisory team will be able to see and sign off. CLiP assessment is highly focussed on verification of logbook records and experience, so supervisors will need to check records, and discuss them with the student, to get them used to this approach.
More detail is available in the CLiP Employer Handbook and supervision pages, but we expect the supervisory team to support the student throughout the placement by:
- holding regular check-ins and some longer meetings to discuss their progress and general welfare on the placement
- providing a lot of support and training in the first weeks of the placement, with the student directly supervised during patient interactions
- organising ongoing regular observation by different members of the team so they receive a range of feedback and remain used to being observed when they are with patients
- checking the student’s appointments to see if anything is coming up for which the student will need direct observation or support
- signing off logbook items, particularly patient interactions - Task Supervisors should sign off items within their scope of practice
- viewing the student’s risk progress dashboard and assessment visit dashboards to check readiness for the next assessment visit
- discussing the next assessment visit, doing practice tasks and checking what the student has prepared for the visit