Background: Within nursing and other health professional education, clinical
mentorship is an integral part of students’ clinical learning experiences. Clinical
mentorship is a widely relied upon strategy to ensure that students benefits
positively in the clinical placements and is perceived as not just as a support
mechanism for students but also as the main vehicle for the activities associated
with learning, teaching and assessment of practice. In South Africa, mentoring in
the clinical settings is not yet formalized, there are no guidelines from the
regulatory body to serve as a guide to mentors in clinical settings and mentors do
not undergo special preparation and it is not yet a common practice in South
African nursing.
Purpose: This study was aimed at exploring and describing the phenomenon of
clinical mentoring as perceived and experienced by the student nurses and clinical
mentors in a selected hospital in Durban.
Methodology: A qualitative approach guided by the naturalist interpretive
paradigm was used in this study. The research designed used was a descriptive
phenomenological approach. The total population for this study was 48
registered nurses working in medical and surgical wards at a selected nursing
college campus in Durban, and 47 first and second year students who were doing
the Diploma in Nursing (General, Psychiatry, Community) and Midwifery. The
sample size consisted of eight mentors and eight mentees working at the selected
wards in the selected hospital. Individual interviews were conducted to collect
data.
Findings: The findings revealed that mentorship in nursing education and training
remains an integral part for student’s clinical learning experiences. The nature and
vi
quality of the relationship between the mentor and the student continues to be of
vital important for an effective mentoring process. It emerged that the assistance
and guidance that the clinical mentors are offering to students are most crucial for
growth and the development of students and gain of quality clinical skills. While
the befriending role of clinical mentors perceived as useful to facilitate students’
settling into the clinical milleu. The roles of mentors emerged as assisting,
supporting, teaching, motivating, befriending and advising students. The ability to
give feedback, experience, availability of time and a positive attitude were the
elements considered important qualities for a good clinical mentor.
The benefits of clinical mentoring outweighed the drawbacks. The benefits of
mentoring were both for the student and for the mentor. For mentors, benefits
were immaterial and included closer follow-up of new developments, teaching
and sharing of experiences. For the students, benefits are based on the level and
quality of grooming and nurturing students gets that help to bridge theory-practice
gap, motivating students to be highly interested to what they do in the clinical
settings. Challenges included limitations on time, shortage of resource, dual
responsibilities of patient care and student teaching, high workload and lack of
formalised mentoring programmes.
Recommendations: This study suggests that the educational and clinical settings
needs to work together to ensure that a formalised mentorship programme is put in
place where clinical mentors will be trained for the role and formally appointed to
the roles. Further research is suggested where the operational management staff of
the organisations and academic college staff will participate to understand how
mentoring is done in the clinical settings, and what criteria the clinical mentors
use to measure the student performance who properly or poorly mentored. / Thesis (M.N.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ukzn/oai:http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za:10413/4714 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Mhlaba, Gertrude Thulisiwe. |
| Contributors | Mthembu, S. Z. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en_ZA |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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