What does 2019 mean for mentorship?

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).