1 Uniprofessional, Multiprofessional, Field of Practice, Discipline: Social Workers and cross-disciplinary supervision Kieran O’Donoghue Lecturer, School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work, Massey University, Turitea Campus, Palmerston North, New Zealand Abstract This paper will critically discuss the phenomena of cross-disciplinary supervision as it pertains to social workers as supervisees and supervisors. In this discussion the uniprofessional history of supervision will be examined together-with the recent development of multiprofessional supervision. The constructions of supervision as a field of practice within a profession and as a discipline and profession in its own right will also be explored. The paper concludes by locating its discussion within the regulatory context of Aotearoa New Zealand, in which the implications of the Social Workers Registration, Health Competency legislation and the report of the Health and Disability Commissioner into Southland Mental Health Services in March 2003 are considered. In the past decade there has been an increasing emphasis upon collaborative practice in social and heath services. One consequence of this has been an emerging cross-disciplinary supervision practice in which practitioners from differing professional and disciplinary backgrounds participate in clinical supervision with each other. For social workers, two factors have seen them exposed to the phenomena of cross-disciplinary supervision. The first is multidisciplinary teams in hospital and health settings from which the managerial supervision provided to social workers has increasingly been shifted to non-social workers due to the separation of the managerial and clinical aspects of health practice (Berger and Mizrahi 2001). The second factor has been the increasing development of the private practice supervision marketplace where the provision of supervision is being outsourced to “independent supervision professionals”. For social workers these cross-disciplinary situations have resulted in their being supervised by and/or supervising non-social workers (O’Donoghue 2003a). To date, there appears to be no empirical evidence concerning the extent to which social workers participate in cross-disciplinary supervision as either supervisors or supervisees. Nor is there any empirical evidence concerning the advantages and disadvantages of cross-disciplinary supervision for supervisors, supervisees and clients (Mullarkey, Keeley, and Playle 2001). There is also no clearly articulated theory, models or protocols for social workers who participate in cross-disciplinary supervision. In short, this means that social workers are engaging in cross-disciplinary supervision without a research, theory and knowledge-base pertaining to cross-disciplinary supervision competence. The discussion that follows aims to provide the foundations of a framework from which social workers can critically consider cross-disciplinary supervision. The framework proposed involves the following four elements: