MENTORSHIP

Mentorship



Mentorship

Introduction

Mentoring is considered as the most important approach that has a direct impact over the performance of students within clinical practice. There are numerous research based articles that have described the role of mentoring for the health care students. It is a fact that mentoring of the nursing and health care students will be helpful for them to develop professional skills. This study intends to explore the concept of mentorship in nursing and the role of mentors in the clinical environment.

Mentor

The term mentor can be described as an individual who supports students and professionals to develop certain important capabilities and skills. The Department of Health, UK, expounds the mentor as the practitioner or the clinical facilitator who helps and supervises the students in their clinical or practical settings (English National Board of Nursing and Department of Health, 2001, pp.nd). Moreover, Nursing and Midwifery Council (2005) also produced generic guidelines over the roles of mentors that include the support and guidance to the students at the practice area, facilitation on learning, student evaluation, and being a role model for their live assistance (Nursing and Midwifery Council, 2005, pp.nd).

Mentorship Programs

The mentorship program has now become a part of nursing qualification in the Great Britain. It is mandatory for the nursing students to fulfil the requirement of mentorship in order to qualify the job description of nurse. The mentorship is usually transferred to those students who are at staff nurse level. Hence, as per the Nursing and Midwifery Council, it is crucial for the mentors to have their registration for at least one year and meet the essential standards of becoming the mentor. It is also the responsibility of mentors to motivate the students for the reflective practice (Myall et al., 2008, pp.nd). Hence, it has been proved that these standards equip the nurses to become effective mentors.

Individual Learning

Individual learning can be defined as the strategy for learning individually. There are a number of studies that have shown the importance of individual learning for better learning. A mentor should support the clinical students for individual learning to promote the quality of self awareness. A study was conducted by Lankau & Scandura (2002), which described mentoring is the most vital strategy of individual learning. The study further described that a student should select a mentor to improve his capabilities and skills accordingly. Similarly, the study also showed that mentoring has a direct impact over the cognitive and behavioural abilities of a nursing student. Hence, a nurse student can easily gain appropriate knowledge from his mentor to improve professional skills and capabilities (Lankau & Scandura, 2002, pp. 779-790).

Role modelled Learning

Role modelled learning can be defined as the learning approach in which a student learns from the behaviour, working, theories, and performance of his role model. There are various studies that have shown the impact of role modelled learning over the personal performance. According to a study, a student should select his role model to follow his thoughts and performance ...