Developing reflective skills in infant mental health postgraduate students: The Australian experience.

Abstract

Postgraduate training in infant mental health (IMH) was offered by the New South Wales Institute of Psychiatry in Sydney, Australia for the first time in 1998. Since 2002, the program has been offered at the master's level by distance education to a multidisciplinary group of students across Australia and New Zealand. This article considers the various ways that the notion of reflective practice and reflective supervision is used in different disciplines and defines our understanding of its place in IMH training. The program content and delivery emphasize the development of reflective skills in students in a number of ways. These include a supportive relationship-based approach to training; a 12-month infant observation which provides students with the opportunity to understand early development, develop observational skills about infants and families as well as their own responses to the infant and family; ongoing clinical supervision and development of a reflective clinical journal; and study and assessment tasks that require the student to integrate new knowledge into clinical practice.