As we enter 2019, there are many questions surrounding the future of undergraduate education and continued professional development for nurses. This year, nurses will be trained using the new Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) standards (2018a). All undergraduate nursing programmes will need approval against the new standards by the end of August 2020 (NMC, 2018b). Many concerns around nurse education are addressed in Duncan and Johnstone (2018), and one of the biggest ones appears to be about mentorship.
As nurses, we have facilitated and supported learning in the workplace for both students and post-registration nurses for decades (Nash and Scammell, 2010; Royal College of Nursing (RCN), 2015). Common iterations have not only been as a mentor but as a coach, supervisor and practice educator or teacher (Nash and Scammell, 2010). The previous NMC definition of a mentor is a person who ‘facilitates learning and supervises and assesses students in a practice setting’ (2008). Many of us are trained mentors or sign-off mentors who have undergone training and meet the NMC requirements, but our numbers are limited, as is the time available to implement these requirements (Rooke, 2014; RCN, 2017). The lack of value attributed to mentorship, variability of placements, lack of placement capacity and lack of learning rather than hours in practice have also been questioned previously (Council of Deans of Health, 2016). Certainly the mentorship role must change to increase the number of nurses who are competent practitioners in terms of technical ability, critical thinking, leadership and flexibility to work in varied settings (NMC, 2018a).
In 2019, students will require a practice supervisor, an academic assessor and a practice assessor (NMC, 2018a). The NMC (2018c) reminds us that ‘all NMC registered nurses, midwives, nursing associates or other healthcare professionals are capable of supervising students’. ‘Practice supervisors’ can therefore contribute to the student's record of achievement and their assessments. The student will also have a nominated practice assessor for a practice placement, so the roles of assessor and supervisor are separate (NMC, 2018c). The practice assessor must be a registered healthcare professional on the same part of the NMC register as their designated student.
We have already seen amendments made, as the NMC reversed its plan not to set standards for new student assessors in practice (Merrifield, 2018). We are also reminded by the NMC and its definition of these new roles that the roles are not the same as that of a mentor. There is a diversity of role definitions and individual expectations within mentoring and supervision relationships (Egan, 2002). For the nurse working in community settings, these distinctions need to be clearly identified as in this time of change, there can be great confusion. It is therefore important to remind ourselves that the main principles of student supervision and assessment remain the same no matter what the roles and titles will be in the future.