A Preliminary Exploration of Virtual Clinical Supervision and Professional Quality of Life in Child Life Specialists

Objective Certified Child Life Specialists (CCLSs) are at risk for increased stress, compassion fatigue, and burnout. The Association of Child Life Professionals (ACLP) recommends that CCLSs receive ongoing, regular clinical supervision. Despite this recommendation, there is a lack of information regarding clinical supervision as currently provided to CCLSs and its impact on professional quality of life. Thus, the goal of this study is to explore professional quality of life, including compassion satisfaction, perceived social support, burnout, secondary trauma, and moral distress, in CCLSs who participated in a virtual clinical supervision program. Method This is an exploratory mixed methods study. In this exploratory study, a total of 22 CCLS who participated in a virtual clinical supervision program completed pre- and post-test surveys using the Professional Quality of Life Scale Health (ProQOL Health) to better understand the impacts of clinical supervision on their professional quality of life. This measure includes subscales for compassion satisfaction, perceived support, burnout, secondary traumatic stress, and moral distress. Results The results of performed t-tests indicated that ProQOL Health scores did not significantly change after participating in the virtual clinical supervision program. Conclusion The findings of this study highlight the importance of exploring the efficacy of clinical supervision and how virtual programs meet the diverse and individualized needs of child life specialists. These results suggest that future supervision programs should explore how work factors impact clinical supervision program efficacy to provide more targeted support to CCLS in various roles and environments.