Ep 30 Cathy Warner

Music Therapy Conversations

In podcast 30, Cathy Warner has a conversation with Luke about music therapy clinical supervision.

Cathy is a music therapy trainer and practitioner. As both an improvising and classical musician she’s a cellist and pianist and has orchestral and choral conducting experience mainly of classical repertoire. She has been the Course Leader for MA Music Therapy at the University of the West of England in Bristol for 5 years, developing the part time training Leslie Bunt established in the early 90s. As a music therapist she’s particularly interested in group work and has facilitated music therapy community groups for people with severe mental health needs for a number of years. This follows an earlier career in music therapy neurorehabilitation and NHS work with adults with learning disabilities. Cathy has a long standing interest in participatory research methods, and used action research to involve people with learning disabilities and no spoken language as active researchers in her PhD project. More recently she has been involved in two European funded ERASMUS+ projects, the LINK and STALWARTS projects, which together with other partner countries have developed ways that teachers and social educators can use ethical and practical frameworks to incorporate music into teaching to support emotional and relational health, particularly for marginalised young people affected by early trauma. From this she has helped develop two CPD distance learning modules that will train teachers and health professionals to establish the ethical and practical frameworks to incorporate musical into a more relational style of teaching any subject.

Continuing professional development is an area of great interest to Cathy, and six years ago she established a bespoke supervision training for music therapists which runs yearly, and is designed for working music therapists, requiring attendance just one day per month over 8 months. The focus is on the use of music within the supervision process itself. Cathy has concerns about the lack of supervision infrastructure within the profession. She is particularly keen on the under-used benefits of peer supervision. Cathy leads quite a busy life with two teenage sons, and finding the reflective space to deeply reflect on therapeutic processes is of central importance to her.

Link to CPD course:

https://courses.uwe.ac.uk/USPKJD30M/supervision-training-for-music-therapists