The global shortage of qualified mental health professionals has necessitated task-shifting models such as Problem Management Plus to treat mental health conditions in low-resource and humanitarian contexts such as the Syrian conflict. The required clinical supervision to support task-shifting is often challenging to source, requiring cross-cultural supervision, which involves culturally distinct supervisors from outside the context supporting local/national Mental Health and Psychosocial Support practitioners. To address the gap in research on cross-cultural supervision in humanitarian settings, we interviewed Australian and Syrian co-supervisors and Syrian supervisees in our Caring for Carers program. Decolonising practices and cultural safety were explored through an epistemic injustice lens. We found that epistemic justice was facilitated through epistemic respect: cultural humility in Australian supervisors and the role of Syrian supervisors as cultural mediators. Epistemic injustice was reinforced through accreditation disparities between Australian supervisors and supervisees and misalignment between supervisors’ contextual inexperience and use of a reflective approach, and practitioner needs. In particular, interviewees continuously emphasised gaps in training to treat severe mental health conditions, which Problem Management Plus and supervision cannot address. It is recommended that future programs facilitate epistemic justice, responding to practitioner learning needs through supervision–training hybrid models and access to formal training and accreditation.
Wong et al. (Wed,) studied this question.