Mentoring in the work of medical personnel

Abstract

Mentoring, i.e. the transfer of experience from senior colleagues to newcomers right during work, is one of the oldest forms of training and is still actively practiced. It allows transmitting not only bare information, but also personal experience, traditions, and professional skills, which is essential for the professional development of an intern. Depending on the ultimate goal, mentoring is conditionally divided into career mentoring when it helps in promotion. For example, a senior nurse performs her work together with one of the nurses of the department, preparing her for future duties and showing effective and proven methods of solving emerging problems. The second type of mentoring is bilateral, when knowledge passes in both directions. For instance, a therapist mentor points out unusual cases from his/her own biography and shows how to approach the patient correctly, and a junior colleague explains the advantages of modern diagnostic methods. In any case, 4 aspects are important: integration (creating a unified team with full mutual understanding and communication rules), regular use of the acquired skills to consolidate them, the seniority of the mentor (who is perceived as a source of knowledge), and expectation — the ambitions of the interns and the efforts they are ready to put in training. Without one of the above points, mentoring will either be inef fective or have the opposite ef fect.