Analyzing the Role of Nurse as a Mentor in Healthcare Settings

This essay provides a comprehensive reflection on the pivotal role of nurses as mentors in healthcare settings. It emphasizes the importance of mentorship for novice nurses, highlighting how experienced nurses guide them through career development, enhance job satisfaction, and ultimately improve the quality of patient care. The essay draws on personal experiences, illustrating the positive impact of mentorship on the author's professional growth and competency. It delves into the responsibilities of a mentor, including sharing knowledge, providing guidance, fostering a supportive work environment, and offering additional educational resources. The essay also explores the challenges faced by nurse mentors and mentees, such as time constraints and communication barriers, while underscoring the significance of effective leadership and communication in overcoming these obstacles. Furthermore, the essay discusses leadership theories and the development of emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and decision-making skills within nursing. It concludes by emphasizing the lasting impact of mentorship on both personal and professional development, leading to improved healthcare delivery and the building of trust and respect within the healthcare team.

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Role Of Nurse as a Mentor
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Mentoring is important for novice nurses to build their careers. A proper mentoring
will guide them towards their career development along with job satisfaction, resulting in
improved quality of patient care. A mentor is an experienced nurse who shares her
knowledge and skill with the student nurses and guides them throughout their careers. This
paper aims to reflect on the role of a nurse as a mentor involved in guiding the mentees
towards their goal.
When I was in a clinical, I came across a nurse who used to mentor me. I always
enjoyed being mentored by her as she guided me and my fellow colleagues, towards our goal
and improve our competency. For mentoring us, she also had to upgrade her standard, acquire
enough knowledge and teaching skills to make us understand better and also solve our
problems quickly. She maintained a proper and sustainable work culture where all the
trainees felt and comfortable to share their issues and feedback. That greatly improved my
bonding with my mentor. She used to take extra classes once a month for the students who
were slow learners. She even called us to show a practical demonstration of insertion of
Urinary catheter, cleaning of Hemovac, wound cleaning and packing. She worked as a
mentor in the hospital for a tenure of 2 years, and within those two years, she taught us a lot
of things. She was like a role model, guiding us towards our success. Nurses are the backbone
of any healthcare, they are the ones a patient is directly involved with, so to deliver efficient
healthcare service to the patients, the nurses need to be trained with utmost care and priority.

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Mentorship is considered to be a very noble profession involved in guiding or
counseling a student and helping him reach his excellence in any profession. A good mentor
is included in the sharing of knowledge and experience to the others which helps them to
achieve their goals and reach an improved level of expertise(Moran & Banks, 2016). They act
as an advisor or coach by providing necessary advice, suggestion, guidance, and feedback to
the student and delivering proper action plans and ideas for succeeding in their field(Farrell,
2018). They help the students to upgrade their knowledge and skills, encourage them to get
out of their comfort zone and try something different and innovative. They also recommend
resources like books, workshop or other learning tools to help the mentees in personal
development and growth. A mentor can also act as a guide. The primary focus of a mentor
should be on the development of the mentee, both personally and professionally. A mentor
should be able to maintain confidentiality or privacy.
In every health care setting, there is a mentor or an experienced nurse who teaches the
novice nurses or other healthcare professionals(Tuomikoski et al, 2019). In my opinion,
mentorship in nursing is essential because a nurse is associated with patient care, so they need
to have the necessary skills and knowledge to serve the patients better and deliver improved
healthcare to them. That will incorporate a leadership ability within them, and in turn, they
will also be able to mentor other nurses in the future(Rylance et al, 2017).

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Mentorship helps to build a leadership ability within a nurse. The “Leadership theory”
consists of different approaches a nurse should follow to become a potential leader. It defines
the traits and characteristics an individual should possess to become an ideal leader. The
Great Man Theory, among the different theories of leadership, suggests that an individual is
born with the necessary attributes and skills, which helps him or her to become a potent
leader in the future. These traits are inherent and result in efficient leadership. In my view, a
good nursing leader should be devoted to developing emotional intelligence among the
trainees, which helps them in facing critical situations in a more matured way(Dyess et al,
2016). They should also guide the inexperienced nurses to think critically and judge a
situation well before acting. That will improve the decision making ability of them. The
leader should give importance to effective communication with the trainees, which will help
in strengthening the mentor-mentee relationship and also facilitate multidisciplinary
collaboration(Hill & Lewis, 2016).

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A nurse mentor has to face numerous challenges and issues regarding the retention of
nursing staff while recruiting efficient nurses in their place and also regarding the proper
engagement of the nurse, which ultimately leads to a loss in productivity and inefficient
patient care(Ritchie & Blair, 2017). And sometimes there are not enough fundings available
for the nurse leaders, followed by an absence of a proper nurse leader workflow that will
guide a nurse with leadership. Moreover, there was a lack of adequate resources available for
the nurse leaders, providing them with sufficient knowledge about leadership. Besides, being
a mentee is also challenging sometimes, lack of communication with the mentor leads to
improper clarity of thought between the mentor and mentee, which often interferes with
effective mentorship. Moreover, giving too much support to the trainees can develop a sense
of dependency among them, thus lowering their self-confidence(Ens, Bazylewski &
Duchscher, 2018). Initially, I faced some problems since my mentor remained very busy and
occupied with her other roles and responsibilities, she could not give me enough time to
teach. And I also could not express my issues and problems to her due to time shortage.
Owing to time constraints, she could not evaluate me properly and failed to give regular
feedback. This miscommunication created a distance between me and my mentor for a certain
period.

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To solve the issue I took the initiative of expressing my difficulties and confusion to
her regarding clinical practices. I opened up to her and said that we are all facing difficulties
in understanding the lesson she provides. Due to her busy schedule, she could not give us
enough time, did not listen to our queries and confusion which lead to this misunderstanding.
She listened carefully to the queries and decided to give the highest priority to educate the
student nurses well, teach them from the basics and encourage, support them throughout the
process, so that they do not feel demotivated, this increased staff retention greatly. She also
learned basic foreign languages to teach the students of other countries, speaking different
languages(Oikarainen et al, 2018).
Being a nurse leader, I was involved in maintaining a proficient culture within the
clinical setting, which will promote a productive work environment(Vitale, 2018). The whole
nursing leadership earned me a lot of trust, confidence, and respect. It helped me build a
strong bond with my fellow nurses, peers and novice ones. I used to conduct regular classes
and training sessions with my trainees, encouraged them, boosted their confidence, guided
and advised them whenever they asked. I performed communication rounds with my trainees
to understand their difficulties and issues.
The mentor taught me many things and helped me in both professional and personal
development. Through mentorship, she was able to guide me and my fellow nurses or
trainees towards our goal, share valuable knowledge and bits of advice to us which helped us
excel in our career with success and also assisted in providing improved and high-quality
healthcare to patients. The mentor-mentee relationship helped me in building a relationship
based on trust, mutual respect and friendship with my mentor. She also seemed to be very
happy and satisfied watching our success. After all, the satisfaction and pleasure a teacher
feels, when they see their students succeed in life is unexplainable, so mentorship is the
noblest and most respected profession of all(Jeffers & Mariani, 2017).

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Although mentorship has allowed the student nurses or inexperienced nurses to gain
the necessary knowledge and skills to provide improved healthcare to patients, still there are
some issues and concerns related to time constraints of the mentor, lack of enough support,
miscommunication with the mentees, which needs to be looked after as soon as possible, to
deliver more efficient and improved mentorship.

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