Creating cohesion in a world of fragments: the experiences of nurse mentors

Anthea Wilson, The Open University

This paper examines the role of the mentor in the pre-registration nurse education context.  Through a series of in-depth interviews and event diaries with 12 nurses who were actively engaged in mentoring, I explore their pivotal role in encouraging and enabling student nurses on their journey through the professional curriculum. 

In nursing, the mentor is a well-defined role that requires mandatory preparation and updates (NMC 2006).  Mentors help to identify learning needs and opportunities for their students and facilitate access to this learning within their own practice area. In this context, they are also responsible for assessing and validating practice competence and professional conduct of students.  The quality of the student experience is partly dependent on the quality of the mentoring they receive.  Investigating the mentor lifeworld can increase our understanding of how exposing students to real professional work plays out in practice for those nurses who are central to and actively engaged in educating the next generation.

Participants were recruited by a process of snowball and purposive sampling from an NHS hospital trust and a primary care trust in the south east of England. A total of 29 conversational, in-depth interviews were carried out with 12 participants within a mentoring cycle, and 28 events were described in diary format.  Taking a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, the qualitative diary data and the interview transcripts have been analysed to identify emerging themes which would represent the structures of experience. 

Initial findings reveal some overarching themes: working with fragments of experience; being aware of high stakes; having hope for the profession.  Both mentors and students work with fragments of experience. The mentor sees a fragment of a student’s learning journey and has to imagine where and how it fits with their image of a professional nurse, in addition to helping the students connect their experiences.  The stakes are high for mentors and their students. There is urgency about learning, and mentors can be subject to persistent questioning or find themselves striving to ‘unlock’ a quiet student. The accounts reveal how when a relationship is under tension, there is a range of emotional responses. Underlying a decision about a student’s aptitude to become a nurse is a poignant reality-check: would I want this person caring for me or my family?  Hope for the profession extended to concern and optimism for the future and recognition of the importance of the mentor role.

Key words : Nurse education; mentoring; phenomenology

Reference

Nursing and Midwifery Council (2006) Standards to support learning and assessment in practice: NMC standards for mentors, practice teachers and teachers. London, NMC

SCEPTRE-Creating_cohesion.ppt