Developing a Clinical Mentoring Plan for Mental Health Nurses

Running head: CLINICAL MENTORING PLAN
CLINICAL MENTORING PLAN
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

1
CLINICAL MENTORING PLAN
Introduction: (200)
Nursing mentorship can be explained as the development of a relationship where an
experienced nurse acts as the guide, role model as well as expert for a new or a less-experienced
nurse. Studies have found that irrespective of an individual being a new graduate nurse from
BSN program or a seasoned pro, a mentoring relationship can contribute to development of new
skills and advancing of the career (Welch, 2017). Hafsteinsdóttir et al. (2017) has defined
mentoring as the reciprocal as well as collaborative learning relationship taking place sometimes
between two or among many individuals however focusing on individual as well as mutual goals
along with shared accountability for the outcomes and the success of the relationships.
Mentoring mental health patients indeed has evidences in guiding new novice nurses in their
professional, interpersonal and personal growth thereby helping I better service delivery and
higher levels of patient satisfaction (Weese et al., 2015). Mentoring in mental healthcare studies
is found to be especially helpful to orient new mental health nurses in the healthcare world,
helping to improve their self-confidence and also helping mentees to understand moral as well as
ethical issues and helping in development of real-world skills that are not covered in the nursing
universities (Hulton et al., 2016). Not only so, mentoring also helps experienced nurses for
moving into the leadership positions and thereby shifting their focus of their careers. This
assignment will mainly show how clinical mentoring plan needs to be developed after
identifying the needs of the mentees and how it would help the mentee to develop skills and
knowledge to ensure quality services for the patients.

2
CLINICAL MENTORING PLAN
Review and summary:
One of the most traditional yet the most effective mentoring model that would be used for
the development of the clinical mentoring plan is the one-on-one mentoring. In this model, one
mentor is matched with that of another mentee where a trained manager may or may not monitor
the progress of the match over the course of 9-12 months. Studies opine that in most cases, the
matches are deliberate and the mentoring program manager mainly pairs two people together
based on particular types of certain criteria (Williams et al., 2018). These are seen to include the
attributes like experiences. Skill sets as well as personalities, different goals and also varieties of
the other factors. Brody et al. (2016) has talked about the positive outcomes that remain
associated with the application of the mentoring model. Many of the interviewee participants
who were engaged in open-ended questioning had stated that since it is the
“familiar model”, people tend to feel comfortable with this model. Many of the studies have also
revealed that this model allows for and even encourages both the mentor as well as the mentee in
developing a strong personal relationship that increases the transparency in the mentoring session
results in better outputs. Levine et al. (2017) is of the opinion that his mentoring model is useful
for organizations and industries who want to target a specific group of people for the
development as well as the retention purposes. Zhang et al. (2016) has stated that once a mentor
as well as the mentee are matched and complete their initial meetings, their relationships are
believed to flourish. The pair is seen to pan the future activities and is seen to be meeting
independently. In this form, the mentors are seen to provide individualistic approach and they are
able to focus their time and concentration to one mentee at a time thereby helping in better
development of the mentee in all aspects. The mentor might be seen to accompany or be present

3
CLINICAL MENTORING PLAN
with the mentees in most of the time of the day providing hands-on experiencing attending to the
individual needs of the mentees which might not be possible in group mentoring style.
The clinical mentoring plan that would be developed in ways by which the mentor would
be able to interact with the mentee at a personal level in order to understand the different
interpersonal attributes that are present in the mentee or need to be developed in her. studies are
of the opinion that mental health nurses are different from other healthcare nurses is that they
need to be more focused for the development of therapeutic relationship with patients so that
mental health patients participate in their care (Grassley & Lambe, 2015). Other nursing fields
have their patients in better condition of mental and emotional health of patients and tackling
such patients are not as critical as that in mental health patients. Hence, the mentors should be
mentoring mental-health novice nurses to develop specific skills that need to be required
exceptionally in the profession of mental health nursing. Hence the clinical mentoring plan that
would be developed should mainly be focusing on identifying the interpersonal skills required
for treating mental health patients by the novice nurses (Jeffers & Mariani, 2017). The clinical
mentoring plan would mainly be including informal interview sessions with the mentee in order
to identify the skills that are lacking in the mentee and these which need to be developed to help
her become better nursing professionals. Following the identification of the skills that are
lacking, objectives would be set through which the nurse would be exposed in situations where
she would be shown how to develop the skills through real-life experiences and hand-on
experiences by the mentor (Harris et al., 2016). The mentor will be handling the situation so that
the mentee might learn by observational learning. Following this, the mentee would be exposed
to such situations again where the mentor would check on the performance and provide
feedbacks to the mentee. Reflective experiences would be providing to mentee to help her reflect