ONLINE MENTORING: PART ONE
The Internet gives mentoring programs a boostYou can often learn more from a seasoned health care provider than a book, which may be the reason many health professionals seek out mentors to help them through their careers. And many clinicians think current trends in health care have made mentoring more important than ever.
“Everyone is being forced to be more efficient, to do more with less and in less time,” said David Witmer, PharmD, director of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) section of clinical specialists. Experienced personnel often have an easier time adapting than those who are less skilled. “All the changes in health care today make it more of an uncertain environment, and the need for mentorship is greater than it has ever been,” he said. By imparting some of their expertise, successful practitioners acting as mentors provide important advice.
After all, learning doesn’t end when you graduate or obtain your credential. With the constant advances in practice, learning is a continuous process, and having a mentor can help clinicians in that process. “I believe that the ability to develop your skills to become a master clinician often is facilitated by somebody whom you regard as a mentor, who helps you understand the context in which practice occurs and how practice occurs, not just our perception of how it should be,” said Jody Gandy, PhD, PT, director of clinical education for the American Physical Therapy Association (http://www.apta.org).
The ASHP has just launched a mentoring program called Practice Advancement Links to match veteran practitioners with less experienced protégés. The program will match participants based on criteria such as specialty area, practice setting, and practice function. Mentor-protégé pairs will then determine how and when to communicate. To help the process along, the ASHP plans to sponsor workshops on improving mentoring skills. The mentoring program requires a yearlong commitment from participants. However, Witmer said, “In reality, if they’re successful in building a relationship, that relationship may well last for life.”
Developing a mentoring relationship on the job may be difficult because of a lack of time or an inability to find a willing, experienced clinician. “My perception is that some of our middle managers, our senior practitioners, have positions that have basically been eliminated,” said Gandy. “So some of our senior persons who had the age and wisdom to be mentors are no longer in those environments.”
Downsized staffs are often busy treating patients, leaving little time for anything else. “Because of our fast-paced, high stress profession, we don’t get the chance to form mentoring relationships like our predecessors did. Staffing cutbacks have increased patient loads and acuity, and unfortunately something had to take a backseat,” said Mark Carraway, a former emergency medical technician and a current nursing student. He and his wife Mary, an RN, are the editor-creators of the NursingNet Web site (http://www.nursingnet.org) and other sites. Based on feedback from participants in the chat rooms at the VirtualNurse Web site (http://virtualnurse.com) that he runs with Ron Phelps, RN, Carraway thinks many nurses are interested in developing mentoring relationships via the Internet. So Phelps, Linda Anderson, RN, and Carraway are developing an online mentoring program to match student nurses with experienced nurses who want to mentor via the Internet. “The mentoring program is in the planning stage.” he said. “We have quite a few nurses willing to mentor. Now all we have to do is find the students or new nurses who want one.”
Christine L. Mitchelson, RN, assistant director of transitional services at Quincy Hospital in Quincy, Mass., has developed a mentoring relationship on her own via the Internet with a nursing student she “met” in a chat room. “I have been helping him since September when he started his senior year. He e-mails me with his questions and concerns that he has and I answer them to the best of my ability,” Mitchelson said. She believes more nurses are seeking Internet mentoring. “I think that nursing students and nurses are turning to the net because the health industry is in such flux,” she said.
Natalie Sabak Pope, MD, RPh, a pharmacist at Lakeland Regional Medical Center in Lakeland, Fla., was matched with a pharmacy student through a program at a pharmacy school. “I’ve been mentoring the one I was matched with and really enjoy the experience. The students are given topics to discuss in class and encouraged to e-mail their mentors with questions and their thoughts on the subject,” Pope said. She and the student have discussed how to handle stress, the best ways to study, new accreditation guidelines for pharmacy, the ethics of giving out drug samples, and the merits of various professional organizations.
To learn more about the nurse mentoring program via the Internet, e-mail Mark Carraway at nursgnt@nursingnet.org.
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