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The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, this paper documents an analysis of mentorship models within the profession of nursing from the 1940s onward. From this analysis, the author was able to categorize the evolution of mentorship models within nursing. Second, this paper identifies four specific contemporary challenges within nursing which relate directly to mentorship. Last, this paper attempts to place a nursing student peer mentorship model in context to best understand how it can benefit the profession of nursing and help address the four identified contemporary challenges within nursing.

The theoretical, philosophical, and research roots that have shaped and informed mentorship models in nursing are examined. The strengths and limitations of nursing mentorship models are analyzed in relation to contemporary challenges in nursing education and practice with a focus on undergraduate peer mentorship. This was achieved through a comprehensive literature review that examined mentorship in nursing from approximately 1940 to the present.

Since Nightingale’s time, five specific mentoring models have been created and adapted within the nursing profession. The five mentorship models identified within this paper are most prevalent within current and previous nursing mentorship literature and demonstrate how models within nursing have evolved from those positing a relatively paternalistic relationship to those favoring more collaborative and reciprocal relations between mentor and mentee. Further, it is argued in this paper that a nursing student peer mentorship model can assist in addressing four challenges which currently face the profession of nursing. These four challenges (which are prevalent in nursing literature) are mentoring as a professional responsibility, projected nursing shortages, communication in nursing, and the development of critical thinking skills.

A limitation of this paper includes the fact that, despite the many challenges facing the profession of nursing today, this paper focuses on only four identified challenges. As it is impossible for one paper to address all of the contemporary challenges which face nursing today, as articulated below, this paper addresses four identified challenges because they relate to mentorship, nursing education, and nursing practice.

Providing opportunities for nursing students to participate in a peer mentoring relationship assists future nurses and the profession as a whole by generating tangible benefits. These benefits include an exposure to theories and models of mentorship and skills to help them fulfill their future professional responsibility of mentoring, development of relationships and skills that can increase both nurse and student retention, and improved communication and critical thinking skills. Last, this study can help nursing schools to identify and work with theories and models of mentorship that will improve their ability to stimulate critical thinking among their students.

This paper fills a gap in the literature by providing an analysis of the theoretical, philosophical, and research roots that have shaped and informed mentorship models in nursing from the 1940s onward. This analysis suggests that student peer mentorship may be the most effective model to address these four challenges in nursing: mentoring as a professional responsibility, projected nursing shortages, communication in nursing, and the development of critical thinking skills. This paper has the potential to make a timely contribution to the global debate regarding mentoring across the healthcare professions.

This study aims to investigate student mentors' perceptions of peer mentor relationships in a health professions education program.

The design uses embodied hermeneutic phenomenology. The data comprise 10 participant interviews and visual “body maps” produced in response to guided questions.

The findings about student mentors' perceptions of peer mentor relationships include a core theme of nurturing a trusting learning community and five related themes of attunement to mentees, commonality of experiences, friends with boundaries, reciprocity in learning and varied learning spaces.

The study contributes original insights by highlighting complexity, shifting boundaries, liminality, embodied social understanding and trusting intersubjective relations as key considerations in student peer mentor relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of peer mentoring on critical care nursing students’ learning outcomes in critical care units.

A qualitative exploratory research design was used to conduct the study. Ten critical care nursing students were recruited from critical care units in the five private and two public hospitals. Descriptions of their experiences were gained through individual face-to-face interviews.

The study reinforces peer mentoring as a vital strategy in helping the critical care nursing students to attain their learning outcomes. However, peer mentoring was not consistent in all hospitals and there were no structured support systems to ensure that peer mentoring was formalized. Making peer mentoring a vital component in the registered nurses core competencies would enable efficiency and guarantee the viability of peer mentoring.

Mentors for the critical care nursing students were not included in the study.

The study identified a need for incorporating a formalized mentorship programme into the core competencies of all qualified critical care nurses, the unit mentor to familiarise themselves with the prescribed learning objectives of the critical care nursing student and an allocation of supernumerary time for the critical care nursing student and mentors to allow for formal mentoring responsibilities to take place.

The study reinforces peer mentoring as a vital strategy in helping the critical care nursing students to attain their learning outcomes and conscietises registered nurses of their responsibility as mentors.

This study aims to examine nurses’ motivation for leadership and explore important challenges nurses face in leadership positions.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 nurses in leading positions. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data.

Nurse leaders are recruited from clinical settings, and the transition process from clinical nurse to leader is demanding. Their motivation for leadership seems to be in human values and caring for others. Lack of strategic focus might be a challenge. Nurses in leadership positions emphasize the importance of good relationships with the staff and require an increased focus on strategic leadership.

Studies have revealed the frustration associated with the role of a nursing leader. According to an evaluation of a clinical leadership development programme, nurses were found to be inadequately prepared for their roles. They had not experienced positive role models, they felt overwhelmed and they regarded colleagues and nursing management structures as unsupportive. There is a need for further research into effective measures to strengthen nurse managers.

The role of leaders has changed over time. There are now increasing requirements and objectives with regard to laws, action plans, improvement projects and cost-effectiveness. A nurse leader has both many tasks and great responsibility. Good leadership relies on skilled nurse leaders meeting statutory requirements in patient care and delivering good quality and patient-safe services. Engaging in process-oriented guidance, such as mentoring, is one way to become more aware of oneself as a professional leader (Mathena, 2002).

By identifying and understanding the specific challenges that nurse leaders face, this study can contribute to the development of interventions and strategies to improve leadership practices, thereby enhancing organizational effectiveness.

Against a British policy backdrop, which places an ever- increasing emphasis on workplace learning in pre-service professional programmes, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the contribution of the mentor to professional knowledge development in nursing, paramedicine, social work and teaching.

Taking the form of a literature review, it explores the influence of policy, professional and theoretical conceptualisations of the mentor role, and structural factors influencing the mentor’s contribution to professional knowledge.

Where there are clearly delineated policy obligations for the mentor to “teach”, mentors are more likely to make connections between theoretical and practical knowledge. When this responsibility is absent or informal, they are inclined to attend to the development of contextual knowledge with a consequent disconnect between theory and practice. In all four professions, mentors face significant challenges, especially with regard to the conflict between supporting and assessor roles, and the need to attend to heavy contractual workloads, performance targets and mentoring roles in tandem.

The authors argue first for the need for more attention to the pedagogy of mentoring, and second for structural changes to workload allocations, career progression and mentoring education. In order to develop more coherent and interconnected professional knowledge between different domains, and the reconciliation of different perspectives, it would be useful to underpin mentoring pedagogy with Bhabba’s notion of “third space”.

The paper makes a contribution to the field since it considers new obligations incumbent on mentors to assist mentees in reconciling theoretical and practical knowledge by the consequence of policy and also takes a multi-professional perspective.

Several studies have shown benefits of peer mentoring on wellness among medical students and health care professionals. Peer mentorship has also been pointed as having interesting potential for International Medical Graduates. However, the literature on peer mentoring at the residency level is very limited. The purpose of this paper is to assess the benefits of a resident-led pilot peer-mentoring initiative at McGill University.

Over 2 years, 17 residents from various residency programs were put in contact with a volunteer peer mentor by e-mail. The structure of the mentorship was flexible. A survey using Likert scale and free text responses was sent to all the participants.

There were response rates of 65 percent for mentees and 59 percent for mentors. The majority of mentees thought the service was either moderately helpful (18 percent) or helpful (36 percent). Several residents noted that communication by e-mails and lack of in-person contacts were a limitation in the mentorship experience. The most frequent challenge that led to consult the service was immigration or arrival from another province.

The results show that the program can be helpful to medical residents, is cost-effective, flexible and could be adapted and replicated elsewhere. In the future, the program will adjust to tend toward a more structured frame, highlighting the importance of in-person contacts. The small sample size of participants and the recall bias are some limitations of our study.

This paper examines some issues that arise from recent research on mentoring across a range of professional settings including teaching, nursing, medicine and social work. It discusses different models of mentoring and their potential relevance to the professional development of specialists and non‐specialists involved in health promotion. It recommends the development of an agreed and clear operational definition of what mentoring is and what it is expected to achieve, a policy framework so that those in mentoring relationships are aware of aims and expectations, good “fit” between the underlying ethos of health promotion and the model of mentoring adopted and proper resources and administration. It also suggests that mentoring schemes need the support of senior managers, clear arrangements for the recruitment, training and support of mentors, careful consideration of the basis upon which mentors and mentees are matched, and ground rules for the mentoring relationship, including those relating to confidentiality.

The current emphasis on the development of an interprofessional workforce in health and social care puts interprofessional learning at the heart of undergraduate curricula. This paper explores the concept of interprofessional mentorship and considers how this role might be developed in order to facilitate interprofessional learning in the practice placement.

Nurses and nursing students often hold stigmatizing attitudes toward patients with mental illness, contributing to poor health outcomes. To address this, direct contact with persons with lived experience in mental illness (i.e. consumers) has been integrated into training curricula. This has shown decreased negative attitudes and increased empathy, but gains are not typically maintained at follow-up. The purpose of this paper is to explore acceptability (i.e. feasibility, process and fidelity) and stigmatizing attitudes of nursing students after the completion of a mentor-based direct-contact curriculum to decrease stigmatizing attitudes toward persons with mental illness.

A five-week manualized contact-based mentorship program, with a mentor (i.e. consumer)–mentee (i.e. student) pairs implemented as a supplement to the clinical curriculum for 23 baccalaureate-nursing students. Feasibility (i.e. attendance), acceptability, fidelity and stigmatizing attitudes were evaluated. The Error Choice Test and the Attribution Questionnaire (AQ-9) were used to assess stigmatizing attitudes.

Feasibility was 100 percent for face-to-face meetings and participants were satisfied with the integration of the program into their curriculum, indicating high acceptability. A repeated measures ANOVA yielded significant findings for stigmatizing attitudes (F (2, 21)=6.96, p<0.02, η²=0.23). This suggests that a consumer-led mentoring program may reduce mental health stigma within student-nursing populations. The AQ-9 did not yield significant results.

This study lacked a comparison group. Future research should include a randomized controlled trial.

This study demonstrates capacity for high feasibility and acceptability for an anti-stigma curriculum in this educational context.

This chapter proposes a global agenda to eliminate racism in nursing by targeting reform at nursing education administration internationally. First, the history of racism in nursing is reviewed, along with two models – the diversity model and the cultural competence model – that were applied unsuccessfully to counteract racism in nursing. Second, a description of how racism is entrenched in nursing leadership globally is presented. Third, the recalcitrant structures that serve to maintain institutionalized racism (IR) in the international nursing education system are carefully examined. Specifically, the components and constructs involved in IR in nursing education are delineated, and the way in which these negatively impact both ethnic minority (EM) students and faculty are explained. Based on this, a global agenda to eliminate racism in nursing education internationally is proposed. Eliminating racism in higher education in nursing is a mandatory social responsibility if global healthcare is ever to be equitable. Five actionable recommendations are made to eliminate racism in higher education are summarized as follows: (1) components of nursing programs which are designed to eliminate racism in nursing education should be governed at the country level, (2) to design and implement a system of surveillance of the global nursing community to enable standardized measurement to ensure nursing education programs in all countries are meeting anti-racism benchmark targets, (3) nursing education programs should be established worldwide to provide individual pipeline and mentorship programs to ensure the career success of EM nursing students and faculty, (4) nursing education programs should be conducted to reduce barriers to EM participation in these individual support programs, and (5) nursing education programs are required to teach their nursing faculty skills in developing anti-racist curricula that seeks to eliminate implicit bias.