Exploring the Populations, Interventions, Settings, Outcomes, and Evidence for Clinical Supervision in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy: A Systematic Review to Guide Future Research on Clinical Supervision

Clinical supervision is a widely accepted component of psychotherapy training and ongoing practice. Recent systematic reviews have focused on evaluating the efficacy of supervision and have found few relevant studies and significant heterogeneity, which has limited their ability to empirically synthesise findings, describe the state of the literature, and highlight critical gaps in the field. This study is a comprehensive systematic scoping review, which aimed to explore the interventions, outcomes, populations, and settings examined to date with a focus on clinical supervision in the context of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). Electronic databases were systematically searched using terms relating to supervision and cognitive and behavioural therapies. The titles and abstracts were initially reviewed, and followed by full-text review. Data was extracted according to research questions of interest. Of 4875 records identified, 15 publications from 14 empirical studies were included in the review. The 14 identified studies were heterogeneous in their aims, designs, outcomes, populations and the features of supervision provided. Across the studies, it was common to use convenience samples. Despite the variability in supervision interventions across studies, many supervision interventions included a significant didactic training component, and no studies clearly specified the mechanisms of their supervision interventions. With the exception of the Cognitive Therapy Rating Scale, there was a tendency to use purpose-built and unstandardized outcome measures. Overall, the supervision literature concerning CBT is a highly heterogeneous body of literature. There is a clear need for more studies exploring supervision, particularly studies evaluating the mechanisms and features of effective supervision of CBT, using the same standardised outcome measures, more diverse samples, and employing appropriate control groups wherever possible.