Staff Supervision Across Sites Posted on March 1, 2006 Joe Price (bio) discusses training and supervision in a dissemination project.

Right now, probably most of my time is working on this intervention project for foster parents and their kids with Patti Chamberlain. It's taking the treatment foster care model and adapting it for kids in regular foster care.

Officially it's known as the Cascading Dissemination of a Foster Parent Intervention. The reason for that is that it's taking the model in Oregon, training us in San Diego. We then train our own staff, which then also delivers the intervention. So it's the idea as you get farther removed from the original developers, can you still have the impact of the intervention?

It's worked well because initially what we did, Patti and her group came to San Diego; we made a visit up there. In the first year, she probably made that visit once a month to train and supervise our staff. Then we had weekly supervisions with one of the clinical folks up in Oregon by phone. We get our staff together and talk about what's happened in the groups. The clinician up there actually views the videotapes of the groups and then provides feedback for the group facilitators. That's worked well.

Then in the second part or the second phase of the intervention we then did the supervision ourselves of our staff, so Oregon didn't have anything involved in training that staff or supervising that staff, but the clinician up there, J. P., continued to supervise the supervisors.

The model that we had was that Oregon was not doing the supervision for the second phase of that project, and that worked well because we utilized the phone. Now it would have been great if we had teleconferencing. I think that would have been ideal, but we didn't. We just didn't have the funding to be able to do that, but it worked well on phone. It really did particularly since we were sending the videotapes up; she was looking at them and giving feedback. Now, two types of videotapes: videotapes of the groups and then we also had our own in-house group meetings and supervision meetings. She'd look at how we were supervising the second generation of interventionists and giving us feedback on that. So that worked well.

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