Mentorship Essay

The purpose of this assignment is to reflect on the role of the mentor in a student nurse’s practice placement and to analyse how I felt throughout my experience as a student mentor, I will use Gibbs (1998) Model for Reflection, this will allow me to identify my thoughts, evaluation, action plan, analysis and conclusion and to look at possible changes I would make to my future mentor experiences.  I will specifically be looking at the role of the mentor and how I am able to facilitate the student’s learning.  I will also focus on the planning and assessment process and evaluate how the mentorship experience has benefited my work and practice and also show that I have been able to provide the student with an environment conducive to learning.

For the purposes of this assignment I will call my student “Annie” to protect her confidentiality.  Annie is a first year student nurse on a two part first placement in an outpatient setting, she worked with me over a period of four weeks in a busy haemodialysis unit in a large teaching hospital. My previous experience of mentorship has been as an associate mentor and I have not been actively involved in the assessment process.

The NMC (2008a) defines a mentor as “a registrant who following successful completion of an NMC approved mentor preparation programme or comparable preparation that has been accredited by an advanced educational institution as meeting the knowledge, skills and competence to meet the defined outcomes.  Vance (2002) was instrumental in introducing the role of mentorship into nursing and described it as “a professional obligation and privilege” as well as “a work and educational environment necessity”.  The term mentorship has a variety of meanings Shaw and Fulton (2012) stated it is the supervision of pre-registration student by a qualified practitioner, “the older more experienced worker acting as a role model, guide and sounding board” to the student.  Also in 2013 Botma et al pointed out that...