Nursing Mentorship

1316 Words3 Pages

A Critical Analysis of how mentors can facilitate learning within the practice setting.

In this essay, the writer will critically debate the role that mentors have in identifying and facilitating students specific needs using tools as the three interviews, teaching methods, assessment and various other strategies to help learners to gain clinical skills, knowledge and build up confidence. It will analyse the mentor importance on a nursing student's pathway, but also will discuss the significant role and obligation that others registered practitioners have in facilitating students' competence development, as the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) code of conduct reminds us (NMC, 2008).
Circumstances that could influence students' learning, …show more content…

Mentorship has his origins far away back in the history, and in time the concept of mentor developed, but within healthcare and social care, mentorship is not classic mentoring as Kilgallon, K. and Thompson, J.(2012 ) underpinned in Mentoring in nursing and healthcare. Classic mentoring, as we can find it in other professional workplaces is when the student can choose his mentor, and they develop a relationship over an extended period.Instead, in healthcare and social care, the mentor is allocated to the learner, which will have different mentors for each practice area and the relationship often finishes after student placement ends. Nevertheless, the writer recognises that in healthcare the relationship between the mentor and student sometimes continued for a long term after the learner placement concluded, and Price (2005) has underpinned that end of the mentorship doesn't necessarily mean the end of the rapport. Moreover, the writer ascertained how important is for the mentor and student to establish a good relationship from the onset, based on trust and respect as we can discover underpinned in the Standards to Support Learning and Assessment in Practice (NMC, …show more content…

The writer has found challenging, engaging in the learning contract as this requires time, which sometimes can be difficult to find in an already busy practice setting. However, the learning contract demonstrated to be precious as it provided the mentor with a step-by-step guide to follow throughout the process. Gaberson. K. and Oermann, M. (2010) define mentoring as 'clinical teaching' which is described as a complex process as the students have not only to learn but to apply what they have studied in the classroom and other experiences in a practice setting.
As part of the learning contract, the mentor has to set up a teaching session for which, first, he has to identify the student needs, level of experience, learning style and to agree with the learner on a topic, as underlined in Gaberson, K. and Oermann, M. (2010) Clinical teaching strategies for

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