Understanding Residents' and Supervisors' Views on Developing Support–Autonomy Balance Through Supervision Methods in Postgraduate Dental Training: A Qualitative Study

Background

Supervisors continuously need to decide when to provide clinical opportunities for unsupervised patient care to facilitate residents' development in the complex clinical learning context. The aim of this study is to explore residents' and supervisors' views and understanding of the influence of clinical supervision on affording a balanced support–autonomy from the cognitive apprenticeship (CA) theoretical lens.

Methods

Residents and supervisors, representing all disciplines, participated in five focus groups and four semi-structured individual interviews. Purposive and convenience sampling methods were used for recruiting participants. The reflexive thematic analysis approach was used for inductive data analysis.

Results

A total of 15 residents and 8 supervisors participated in this study. All agreed that CA teaching methods can be applied across all levels. Participants experienced changes in their supervision methods and supervisor–resident interactions at different levels of training. They related the selection of supervision to task-, resident- and supervisor-related factors. Learning facilitating factors in clinical learning environment were identified and suggestions to enrich residents' learning experiences were also reported.

Conclusion

The current study found that a one-size-fits-all paradigm may not be effective for clinical supervision. It contributes to our understanding of how the CA model may be used to guide supervisor behaviour and how such practices can be modified to residents' level of development and competencies.