ABSTRACT
Health professionals generally work in interdisciplinary teams and are expected to manage the complexities of engaging with those from differing professional backgrounds. Critical reflection based on Fook and Gardner (2007) can provide a language and framework for working across disciplines. This chapter outlines the experience of an interdisciplinary team in a health service – the Rehabilitation in the Home team (RITH) at Southern Health – in implementing peer supervision groups using critical reflection. Rehabilitation in the home is a home-based program providing intensive rehabilitation services to the Southern Metropolitan region in Victoria, Australia, with offices located at three different nodes across the region. Unlike many of the other existing home-based rehabilitation programs, Southern Health RITH provides both case management and Allied Health therapy from the following disciplines: speech therapy, dietetics, neuropsychology, occupational therapy, physiotherapy and social work. The current RITH case managers are all qualified professionals from a variety of backgrounds, including occupational therapy, social work and nursing. This provides a wide variety of educational back-grounds and varied theoretical knowledge bases, but also poses a unique challenge for peer supervision using critical reflection. The disciplines felt safe within the context of their own discipline, but then had to meet the challenge of working across disciplines.
