MENTOR

The role and responsibilities of the mentor

The role and responsibilities of the mentor

Introduction

The purpose of this assignment is to critically analyse the responsibilities and the accountability that a mentor has in assessing the learner's competence in the field of nursing. Nursing is a profession that has some great responsibilities that are similar to what responsibilities a doctor has in the field of medical science. As it is important for doctors to be well practiced before they involve themselves in the professional field and start serving the nation with their knowledge and skills, in the same way, nurses, who are part doctors and assist them in their work should be equally skilled and have adequate knowledge so that they could work under any kind of working conditions especially in critical situations so that they could treat the patience well and their assistance to patient and doctors could be error free (Burns, 2003, pp. 65).

But the most important question that arises here is this that who is to evaluate the level of competency that a nurse has in order to fulfil the required practices of the nurse in professional field. Here the work of mentor comes. A mentor is a person who can assess and evaluate that whether the learners in the field of nursing have all what it takes to be a good and well practiced nurse. The responsibilities and accountability for the mentor who is assessing nursing students is very important for the mentor to realize and for the same very reason, it is equally important for the mentor to adopt certain assessing techniques so that the mentor could make sure that the learners in the nursing profession now have all the relevant knowledge and skills that a nurse student should have in order to cope with patients of various nature and condition and could also be able to work under various situations (Hurley, 2008, pp. 30).

Nursing knowledge is acquired through several means; tradition, authority, borrowing, trial and error, personal experience, role-modeling and mentorship, intuition, reasoning, and research. (Burns and Grove, 2002). Many nurses base their practice according to ritual and tradition without questioning the validity of what they do. Nurses would agree that providing the best quality care to patient's results in positive outcomes. But what is the best care and how do we know that our interventions are current and beneficial? This paper will explore the developments of nursing knowledge and nursing research that has brought the profession to where it is at today (Boschma, 2003, pp. 13).

Discussion

Nevertheless, the studies that have examined this issue provide mixed support for these theoretical conclusions. For example, some research has shown that in cross-gender mentoring relationships experience more obstacles and fewer benefits than do in same-gender mentorships. However, other research does not support this pattern of findings. For instance, in examining satisfaction with formal mentoring, both male and female in same-sex relationships did not report being more satisfied than those in cross-gender ...