Nursing Care Training and Mentorship
What is Mentorship,Beneficial Outcomes,Who are Nursing Mentors,Requirements for a Mentor in Nursing,Versatility in Nursing Mentorship,Benefits for Nursing Graduates,Evaluating Feed Backs in Nursing Mentorship,Strategies for Nursing Mentorship.
What is Mentorship
A
formal definition of mentoring is a spontaneous pairing by two individuals or a
grouping of two or more individuals who feel they can assist each other in
professional and sometimes personal growth.
The mentor mentee relationship
tends to evolve and endure for the rest of one’s career and consists of
counseling, teaching, networking, and coaching.
Vance and Olson (1998)
described mentoring as a developmental and caring support or connection between
two people which assists with socialization at each stage of a mentee’s career.
Beneficial Outcomes
More
and more nurses are seeing the benefits of having an expert-to-novice
relationship both as an expert as well as a novice. Certainly, the advantages
to the novice are clear.
Mentors see the experience as an extremely positive
opportunity to expand their own vision, and at the same time, impact the
profession by assisting in shaping future nurse leaders.
The health care
organizations employing the mentors view the experiences as a favorable and
cost-effective recruitment and retention tool, which ultimately improves job
satisfaction and morale.
With the current interest in acquiring Magnet Status
for hospitals and health care organizations, the concept of providing staff and
new graduates with ongoing mentoring relationships will flourish.
Professional
organizations such as the American Association of Critical Care Nurses and
Sigma Theta Tau International also encourage their experienced and new members
to pair up in a variety of activities such as: starting new local chapters, developing
evidence based protocols, preparing for a leadership role , and conducting
clinical research.
Higher education uses mentoring models to connect their
students to practicing and experienced alumni and to friends or partners of the
university.
Who are Nursing Mentors
Most
mentees see the person who eventually becomes their mentor as a role model.
Role modeling has been used in nursing pedagogy to improve interpersonal skills
and impact change as well as with clinical skills (Kolb, 1982).
Whether the
experience is labeled as an internship, externship, apprenticeship, fellowship,
preceptorship, or mentorship, the fact remains that an experienced person is
facilitating the role transition of an inexperienced individual to some extent.
The degree of success of this growth is influenced by many variables including:
the selection method of mentors, the way the assignment of mentees is
determined, the readiness of the mentee to assume the formal as well as the
informal knowledge from the mentor, and the organizational culture that surrounds
the mentor mentee relationship.
Requirements for a Mentor in Nursing
The
process of an experienced individual coaching, guiding, or mentoring a novice
has frequently been cited in nursing as a mechanism of building leadership
skills (Vance & Olson, 1998; Grossman & Valiga, 2000; Bennetts, 2000;
Peluchette & Jenaquart, 2000).
Many of these labeled mentorships are
actually preceptorships since they are an assigned relationship that is part of
a course assignment or a component of job orientation.
There are multiple peer,
professional, and faculty mentorship publications in the literature that focus
on specific skill acquisition over a set, prescribed time frame (Suen &
Chow, 2001; Price & Balogh, 2001; Lloyd Jones, & Walters, 2001).
Some
of the skills include acquiring: new communication strategies for success as a
nurse, methods to enhance creative abilities, all types of clinical skill
building, and mechanisms to facilitate research and publications.
Versatility in Nursing Mentorship
In nursing it
is also accepted that nurses can have different mentors during the various stages
of their careers.
Due to our tumultuous health care environment, it is more
imperative than ever that nurses gain self-confidence, a goal that can be
achieved by becoming competent not only with clinical skills but also with
leadership skills such as negotiation, creative thinking, communication, and
collaboration.
In order to achieve this confidence nurses, need to be mentored
or guided by experienced nurses who can provide clinical knowledge and skills,
practice with leadership and management skills, as well as psychosocial
support.
Having a mentor can assist a nurse to gain insight into their ability
to impact change, think creatively, empower themselves and others, and acquire
various skills to prepare themselves for a successful career as well as to
strengthen the nursing profession (Grossman & Valiga , 2000).
Benefits for Nursing Graduates
Nursing
students need to be socialized into the profession in order to adjust to the
new graduate role. The nursing profession often uses preceptors to orient new
staff and to assist them in gaining competence-based skills as well as to
increase clinical decision- making ability before being deemed safe to practice
independently.
In fact, having a mentor is extremely important as a
developmental tool for the progression of a nurse’s career, for it can
influence one’s confidence and self-esteem in assisting with preparing people
for leadership roles (Vance & Olson, 1998).
Evaluating Feed Backs in Nursing Mentorship
The
mentor mentee dyad does not include the aspect of formal evaluative feedback.
When two people are assigned to work together by faculty or administration it
is considered a form of mentoring called a preceptor preceptee relationship and
involves evaluation (Flynn, 1997).
Historically, precepting has been a
tried-and-true method of assisting new graduates and inexperienced nurses in
acquiring the supervised practice of working with patients requiring specific
nurse competencies.
This one-to-one assigned expert and novice relationship
allows the novice to gain skills and decision-making experience, while
receiving instant feedback from the expert, and still provide safe patient
care.
It is important for longitudinal research studies to be conducted which
track a mentoring relationship from the beginning to its current status. It
would be interesting to assess how many assigned preceptor preceptee relationships evolve into mentoring dyads and to identify patterns which may predict a
successful match between experienced nurses and novices.
More databased outcome
studies measuring a mentee’s leadership skills, assessing a mentee’s career
status, and identifying the mentee’s mentoring of others are needed. Noe,
Greenberger, and Wang (2002) cite several ideas for conducting future research
studies which have clear significance to the nursing profession.
If having a
mentoring experience as a beginning nurse, clinician, educator, researcher,
and/or administrator is found to be a reliable predictor for success, an
evidence-based protocol of mentoring could be established.
Strategies for Nursing Mentorship
As
for specific studies regarding mentoring in nursing research, Byrne (2003,
2002), Zambroski (2004), Records (2003), and Morrison-Beedy (2001) describe
strategies for assisting faculty and students to participate in research.
Jacelon (2003) describes mentoring for new faculty that includes suggestions on
succeeding with the scholarship aspect of the ten sure process and Olson (1995)
and K. Roberts (1997) present ideas for increasing faculty scholarship
productivity through mentoring in predoctoral fellowships.
No studies were
found depicting measurable outcomes of how mentoring assisted faculty and
students with research.