IJSP Number 5, 2023

50 conditions are increasing worldwide, finding that 1 in every 8 people live with a mental disorder. Although the challenge to meet these mental health needs is great, a body of research has established many effective psychosocial treatments to address depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric disorders [18, p. 793]. The WHO report [15] explicitly calls for the use of “evidence-informed” treatments and to “scale-up evidence-based psychological support” (p. 15). However, many clinicians (or those in the mental health professions pipeline) may not be prepared to implement these ‘cutting edge’ and effective treatments in professional practice. How can we prepare clinicians to implement empirically supported treatments? An important component in dissemination and implementation is the provision of systematic and focused clinical supervision. Although practitioners may have an intellectual or theoretical grasp of an intervention protocol, implementation requires training which that involves clinical supervision and opportunities for ongoing consultation. Adequate supervision [19] or supervision-as-usual is not sufficient to ‘train-up’ to the level of competence necessary to employ technically sophisticated intervention protocols. Competency-based approaches are uniquely suited to the training required for implementation. For example, Falender and Shafranske [1], [2], [13] in their competency-based clinical supervision model identify the constituents of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are assembled and constitute a competency. This approach forms the basis of ongoing training within the context of supervision and orients observation, evaluation, and learning activities to the specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes employed in the treatment protocol. In addition to building competence in the treatment, supervisors can influence the implementation climate which can inform implementation practice [20]. Competency-based approaches to supervision complement the larger goal of “training up” clinicians to employ evidence-based treatments to effectively address the mounting mental health demands for care. However, these objectives cannot be attained without addressing the barriers that compromise the quality of clinical supervision and impede the implementation of supervision practices that explicitly focus on competency development. 3. BARRIERS TO ENHANCING THE QUALITY OF CLINICAL SUPERVISION To begin, value is still not attached to clinical supervision. Although there has been some increase in agreement that clinical supervision is a distinct professional competency, as evidenced by the Guidelines for Clinical Supervision in Health Service Psychology [8], [9] and the APA Commission on Accreditation Implementing Regulations [21], there are still several faulty assumptions that predominate in the field [22]. One is that clinical supervision is learned primarily through absorption or osmosis: meaning that if one has been supervised, they are prepared to supervise, regardless of the quality of the supervision they received and irrespective of any competence to supervise. And related, it is often assumed that a competent (or even