Restoring
Supervision Hub
At a glance
- Taking the time to talk about our feelings can help us
- If your supervision doesn't feel restorative, ask for it with a colleague or peer group
- All registered nurses must be offered Restorative Clinical Supervision
It also builds resilience - the strength to cope with challenges - in staff, their teams, and the organisations they work in.
When creating the Supervision Hub, people said it was important to have psychological safety and wellbeing. They also wanted a culture of supervision to help staff stay in their jobs.
model says that the restorative approach helps people think about their feelings and their work. It improves emotional wellbeing, reduces stress at work, and helps people manage personal and job demands. It can also help staff stay in their jobs. Reflective and restorative supervision is very important. Focusing too much on the management side of supervision can reduce time for reflection. This can lead to less freedom in decision-making and poorer services for people who need care.
Restorative Supervision was first created by Sonya Wallbank .She found that focusing on the needs of the person, not just their work, reduces stress and burnout. It also makes work more enjoyable.
Types of restorative supervision
There are some specific types of supervision that can be considered to be 'restorative':
Restorative Clinical Supervision (RCS) is a key part of the Professional Nurse Advocate role, and is based on the A-EQUIP model.
In Wales, all registered nurses must be offered Restorative Clinical Supervision at least four times a year, for 1.5 hours each time.
Health Boards in Wales are using the 'RESTORE' training programme for nurses to learn Restorative Clinical Supervision. You can find out more via the intranet pages for some of the health boards:
- Aneurin Bevan University Health Board
- Cardiff and Vale University Health Board
- Powys Teaching Health Board
- Swansea Bay University Health Board
For more details, search for the “000 NHS Wales - Restorative Clinical Supervision Programme for Nursing” on ESR .
Dr Noreen Tehrani says that restorative supervision gives a safe space to share worries or feelings of failure. It helps people get support, learn new ways to cope, and build resilience.
Those working together can benefit from restorative practices such as Compassion Circles, Schwartz Rounds or specific approaches such as Resilience-based Clinical Supervision (RBCS) .
These can promote psychological safety and the willingness to share vulnerability leading to greater empathy and understanding, especially in multi-professional teams.
Building Restorative Cultures
Restorative cultures are those that support good relationships between indviduals, teams and organisations:
Some people worry that talking about resilience makes it sound like staff are to blame if they struggle. But resilience is not about blaming people.
It is not like engineering, where you measure how much weight something can hold. Instead, resilience is about how systems and communities can adapt and bounce back together.
Personal resilience should grow as part of a community. This means having honest talks, supportive relationships, and time to reflect. Resilience is not just inside one person - it is shared between people.
In New Zealand, a restorative response means having honest talks in a safe space. It aims to fix harm, meet needs, rebuild trust, stop problems from happening again, and repair relationships.
While not all leaders are supervisors, all supervisors can be considered to be leaders who benefit from a focus on caring workplaces and compassionate cultures.
Compassionate leadership involves a focus on relationships through careful listening to, understanding, empathising with and supporting other people, enabling those we lead to feel valued, respected and cared for, so they can reach their potential and do their best work.
Psychological safety is feeling safe within your workplace to openly express your ideas, admit mistakes and to respectfully question or challenge your colleagues, without fear of any retaliation or detrimental effects to you.
Developing, promoting, and operating a psychologically safe culture in your health care team is a crucial part of providing safe patient care.
The potential for healing, learning and improving is enhanced within a restorative just culture where people feel safe to raise concerns and talk openly about a harmful event or experience without a fear of being judged.
Should you require any further information, please contact HEIW.MentalHealthWorkforcePlan@wales.nhs.uk .
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Webpage last updated on: 27th January 2026