Tiltai

Caring professionals are one of the largest groups working in the field of human services. Important personal qualities in this area include strong communication skills, the ability to empathise with individuals’ experiences and manage one’s own emotions, a sense of responsibility, patience and helpfulness, and self-confidence. This article compares attitudes towards professional activity between two caring professions: social workers and pastoral care professionals. The results of the survey revealed that both groups have similar views on the specifics of their work, with more noticeable differences in attitudes related to spirituality. This aspect is significantly more important for pastoral care professionals than for social workers, although the ultimate goal of both professions remains the same: providing professional support to those in need.

The article is devoted to the anthropologically centred supervision of social field specialists. The concept of supervision is based on the patristic anthropology of the Church, which is fundamentally person-centred in any professional activity. This approach to supervision is very modern, as it resonates with the current professional paradigm shift from a profession-centred approach to a person/client-centred approach. The article presents quantitative research, with the aim of showing the expediency of person-centred supervision from the attitude of social workers. It analyses the main methodological principles of person-centred (the author uses the term ‘anthropologically centred’) supervision, and their application in supervision: 1) the concept of a person; 2) the term ‘personality development’ or personality transformation; 3) the factor of high-quality communication or reciprocity.

Within this article the need and possibilities of supervision to medical staff for their professional well-being are analysed. Case of supervision to medical staff in Lithuania is discussed using critical reflection. In health care professions, same as in other helping professions, burnouts, tensions, incertitude and existential anxiety may arise among the staff. Thus, conflicts may arise over social interactions at work. Critical reflection methodology, used in this research, revealed that medical staff does not yet identify the supervision as a potential mean of their professional support. Notwithstanding, the open dialogue, enabled by the process of supervision, demonstrated the lack of collaborative culture and culture of silence in healthcare work environments. Medical staff may be anchored to the long-established attitudes and beliefs of their organization, also they may face frustrations with regard to an open dialogue on the matters of their work, since they may feel rather disempowered for making substantial changes in their work. Medical staff may also face frustrations of leaving the so-called comfort zone and helpless when facing healthcare system barriers. Within this article, the need for support to medical staff through professional supervision is highlighted. The experience of the supervision in which an equal and dialogical relation is promoted, may be extrapolated to collegial relation in the organization. Supervision may also encourage the participants to leave the victim role and to acquire a constructive voice in professional relation. Thus, the supervision, in providing room for dialogue and reflection on professional relation, may be a great an opportunity for roles’ transformation of participants for constructive dialogues and organizational culture. Supervision contains the great potential to develop health system transformations through promoting dialogical professional relation and enrichment of professional identity of medical staff. Supervision might be a powerful support to medical staff in particularly critical situations such as engendered by COVID-19. The inter-institutional collaboration between associations of supervisors and medical staff is recommended, with the participation of representatives of health care institutions and universities.

The article analyses the most relevant anthropological and transformative tasks of social work supervision in the context of today’s risk society, promoted by the process of globalisation with its instrumental rationality, which devalues the significance of the personality in the social system. The article provides the ontological grounds of the transformative function of supervision based on synergic patristic anthropology, and describes the simultaneous vectors of the transformative function in the supervision process: 1) experiential (experience-based) transformative learning, or acquisition of ‘practical wisdom’; and 2) anthropological transformation as a process of recreation of true self-identity. The article conceptually emphasises the decisive influence of the intrinsic quality of the supervisor’s personality in the performance of the transformative tasks of supervision, as well as the supervisor’s ability to form reciprocity relations with supervisees in the supervision process.

The article analyses a relatively new position in the field of social services for the family: the complexity of the professional activity of a case manager, and the prospects of applying supervision as a form of professional support. In the field of social work, supervision is already a well-known way of counselling professional relationships. While improving their professional qualifications, social workers seek to participate in group, team and individual supervision. The supervision of the manager and the whole organisation is also well known in social work practice. In Lithuania, as in the rest of the world, supervision first established itself in the field of social work, which only proves the complexity of this profession.Social work as a profession is undergoing constant change, services are expanding, and more and more attention is being paid to specialised methodologies when the global approach no longer satisfies the current situation of empowerment. The case manager is a new position, the content of which is still being formed. The research has revealed that employees experience stress and tension as a burden of responsibility, they become the creators of the content of this position, and they face obstacles to inter-institutional cooperation.The qualitative research presented in this article, the interviews with case managers, and the reflection on the experience of supervision, allow us to draw conclusions about the prospects for supervision, and allow us to offer specific forms of supervision; and individual and team supervision become unique in this situation.