REFLECTION ON ROLE AS A MENTOR IN PRACTICE

Reflection on role as a mentor in practice

Reflection on role as a mentor in practice

Introduction

Mentoring has been a buzzword in management circles for the past several years but many hospitals are now looking at mentoring programs for nurses as a retention tool. Walsh and Clements 2 found that mentoring programs that helped shape "a positive enforcement for nurses to nurture career development, satisfaction, and leadership, therefore increasing job satisfaction and nurse retention. This sounds very good in theory, but is challenging to implement. Who do we select to mentor, how do we train them to assist the new nurses to grow and mature, but yet stay with our institution.

In 1996 Leveck and Jones3 found that the factor that most influenced nurse retention and turnover was management style. Their results substantiated the belief that aspects of the practice environment affect staff nurse retention and in turn impacted the quality of care delivered by the nursing units. I truly belief that front line managers and experienced staff are the source of the motivators noted by Herzberg, and this is the reason that management styles that promote these items have lower staff turnover.

The Health Care Advisory Board conducted research and interviews with over 100 patient care executive and industry experts. The data noted the root causes of higher turnover among less experienced nurses to include poor training and support systems for nurses during their first year on the job. The Advisory Board places responsibility for this high rate of turn over on the hiring institutions, but it must be noted that the schools of nursing are not preparing their graduates for the real world. Therefore many new nurses have no experience or practical knowledge of the job they are entering.

As a new nursing shortage looms on the horizon how can we retain our current group of experienced nursing staff. First we must prevent job dissatisfaction by meeting hygiene factors ad outlined by Herzberg, but we must move beyond this and provide motivators. These motivators must include meaningful and challenging work and feelings of achievement. As professionals we must continue to provide competitive pay and benefits, but we must go beyond this. Our multifaceted program must include, joint effort with schools of nursing, training front line managers to be retention focused, implementing mentoring programs, and to focus on the assets provided by our aging nurses.

Reflection on role as a mentor in practice

The term `mentor' arrived in the UK through the lexicon of education and curriculum design largely derived from North American texts and journals (Morton-Cooper & Palmer 1993). The diffusion of the concept of mentorship from North America to Great Britain ``slipped into the folklore of nurse education almost unnoticed and quickly become part of the educational language of the Eighties and Nineties'' (Burnard 1990, p. 352). North American literature alluded to the terms mentor and preceptor with the latter being exclusively used in relation to senior students. It is not surprising therefore that, in Great Britain, mentor ...