Mentorship For Nursing - Essay Example

Consequentially, mentors are responsible for and can enhance the quality of mentoring culture in clinical settings. How to promote effective mentorship is a difficult question, but it is clear that a good mentor will avoid the errors of over-protection and the flaws of the master-protege relationship, but will display appreciation of students’ efforts, demonstrate genuine concern for their successes and promote mutuality and reciprocity in their relations with students. Mentorship is becoming a critical instrument of growing professional nurses.

With the shortage of professional nursing staff, mentorship has a potential to expand the pool of professional, caring nurses in healthcare. “Mentorship initiatives, especially in hospital settings, are being introduced and fostered to attract nurses to healthcare systems with the primary goals of nursing retention and support” (Block et al 134). However, mentorship is not good by itself; rather, good mentorship is the key to developing and retaining professional nursing staff (Jarvis 415).

Much has been written and said about factors affecting mentorship and mentored students, in particular. Apart from the fact that students assessed formatively on their hand washing skills experience anxiety and anticipation, formative assessment also exemplifies the final product of the long process of mentoring and can be used to expose the flaws and inconsistencies in student-mentor relations. A student assessed formatively on their hand washing skills is primarily influenced by the quality of their relationship with the mentor, mentor guidance, culture, and leadership style (Bally 144; Bell-Ellison & Dedrick 556-7; Littlejohn 456; Saarikoski 1016).

Guidance affects the quality of nursing student results, as it represents routine elements of daily cooperation with students, including problem-solving activities and planning formative assessment of the basic nursing skills (Bell-Ellison & Dedrick 556; Berk et al 70). The quality of the student’s presentation is profoundly influenced by their relationship with the mentor; this relationship incorporates a complex set of elements, including student and mentor’s personal problems, worldview, and social activities (Bell-Ellison & Dedrick 557).

One important aspect that influences both the relationship and the results of formative assessment is the mentor’s leadership style, as well as the supervision system (Saarikoski 1016). Simply stated, how the student is assessed and what skills he (she) develops as a result of the mentorship program largely depends upon the quality of mentor’s supervision and their understanding of the students’ experiences, contexts, and cultures (Saarikoski 1016). The importance of the mentorship-culture relationship can hardly be overstated.

Successful mentors must be able to create a “full” picture of the organization and leadership, by recognizing a complex interrelationship between mentorship, leadership and organizational culture (Bally 144; Callahan & Ruchlin 296; Neuhauser 471). This picture will help nursing mentors to understand how various aspects of one and the same culture interact. The choice of particular leadership style must also depend upon the culture, in which students and mentors interact, since no mentorship will work when there is no leadership-culture congruence