Faculty of Education

Conference "Professional Supervision: Common threads, different patterns" 2010

Suzanne Lohrbach

“Suzanne Lohrbach, MS, LICSW – is the clinical supervisor for child protection field services and family group decision making for Olmsted County Child & Family Services in southeast Minnesota,USA. She is the consultant to a public-private domestic violence team addressing the overlap between child maltreatment and adult intimate partner abuse.  Ms. Lohrbach has over twenty years of experience as a child and family therapist working with high-risk child protection cases, including the development of “Family Works” a collaborative project with the community and the public child welfare agency for families where children have been maltreated and the risk of reoccurrence is high. She has had twenty years of experience in the supervision of frontline child protection social workers, family meeting coordinators/facilitators and therapists.  Ms. Lohrbach has developed a model of group supervision within a child protective services agency and that model has been implemented over the past ten years.  She is on the advisory board for the Strengths Institute at the University of Kansas and the American Humane Association Advisory Board on family group decision making. She has clinical consultation responsibilities both to the domestic violence response team and the implementation of a child protection practice framework throughout the continuum of child and family services. Ms. Lohrbach has presented at state, national and international conferences on child welfare issues. She has taught university courses in social work, child advocacy studies and family therapy at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.  Ms. Lohrbach received the 2002 and 2006 Woman in Leadership Award for her work in child welfare reform.

Publications:

• Lohrbach, S. (2008). Group supervision in child protection practice. Social Work Now, 40, 19-24.
• Lohrbach, S., & Sawyer, S. (2004). Creating a constructive practice: Family and professional partnership in high-risk child protection case conferences. Protecting Children, 19(2), 26-35.”