Clinical case formulation plays a central role in guiding assessment, engagement, and intervention. However, formulation models often under-emphasise the role of identity in shaping how clients understand themselves, their distress, and their pathways to care. In military populations, identity is often tightly bound to values, role expectations, coping styles, and help-seeking behaviour. When this identity is disrupted, hidden, or threatened, psychological distress can be intensified and engagement with care complicated.

This presentation introduces an identity-informed approach to clinical formulation grounded in a synthesis of the military mental health literature and clinical practice insights, drawing particularly on a scoping review of research on military identity, culture, and wellbeing. The Military Identity Model (MIM) is presented as a conceptual framework for thinking about how different configurations of military identity may shape presenting problems, risk formulation, therapeutic alliance, and treatment response. Through applied clinical examples, the presentation demonstrates how identity can be incorporated into biopsychosocial formulation alongside diagnostic frameworks, rather than treated as an adjunct cultural consideration.

While the framework is grounded in military contexts, the presentation will briefly consider how similar identity dynamics may arise in other high-identity occupational roles. This will be presented as a conceptual extension rather than an evidence base, with a focus on how clinicians might begin to think about identity processes more broadly in formulation work.

The session is designed to be clinically practical, offering structured ways for psychologists to explore military identity during assessment and to integrate identity-related considerations into formulation and treatment planning when working with current and former serving members.

A recent Australian health regulator survey reported that 1 in 10 clinicians are unsure about their professional future or intend to leave within the year (Tan et al., 2025), citing burnout, lack of recognition, and diminished job satisfaction. These findings accentuate urgent workforce sustainability concerns and call for proactive, education-focused responses. This interprofessional project examined whether compassion within clinical supervision represents a frequently accessed and preventative scaffold for clinician wellbeing - one that aligns with contemporary models of supervision and professional development.

Compassion can be defined as a “sensitivity to suffering in self and others, with a commitment to try to alleviate and prevent it” (Gilbert, 2014). While healthcare professionals are expected (and frequently mandated within ethical and clinical guidelines) to demonstrate compassion toward clients, receiving compassion from others and extending it toward oneself remains comparatively neglected within professional cultures (Pavlova & Consedine, 2023). A growing evidence base links compassion to enhanced therapeutic outcomes, increased resilience, and protection against burnout (Johnson et al., 2020) and vicarious trauma (Matos et al., 2018; Kirby, 2022). Integrating compassion into supervisory frameworks may therefore offer a theoretically coherent mechanism for supporting clinician wellbeing, particularly for early career practitioners navigating developmental stressors, performance evaluation and competency-based training demands. However, compassion in supervision remains conceptually underdefined and empirically underexamined.

This study addressed two questions: (a) What is compassion in supervision? and (b) Does it help early career clinicians? Australian psychologists, speech pathologists and occupational therapists completed an anonymous online survey, providing free-text responses to open-ended questions regarding their experiences of compassion in supervision. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis and findings highlight how interprofessional clinicians conceptualise compassion within supervisory relationships; identify facilitators and barriers to its enactment; and negotiate the nuanced balance between compassion, accountability, and performance standards within competency-based education pathways.

We propose that clarifying and operationalising compassion in supervision may help explain why some supervisory relationships foster psychological safety, reflective capacity and professional growth, while others contribute to fear, avoidance, rupture or stagnation. By platforming compassion as a legitimate supervisory competency, this research advances scholarship in supervision models and contributes to broader initiative efforts to strengthen allied health education and interprofessional workforce sustainability.

Authors: Freebody, S., Mason, J., Wilson, C., Brown, S., Ireland, R., & Beccaria, G.