Background: Mentoring in Palliative Medicine is critical to training, career satisfaction and professional development. Yet, there are no accounts of effective mentoring programs in Palliative Medicine. This gap is attributed to a failure to define mentoring practice and a lack of acknowledgment of mentoring's context-specific, goal-sensitive, mentee-, mentor-and organizational-dependent nature that has hindered effective review of mentoring programs.

Provision of end of life care and coping with the emotional and existential distress engendered by palliative care demands the provision of holistic support and training for palliativists. Mentoring is an effective means of meeting this need; however little is known of mentoring in palliative care and a universally accepted learning theory of mentoring remains lacking in this setting. To advance mentoring practice in palliative care, we review the only two evidenced based mentoring theories based upon narrative reviews of mentoring practice in the key specialties within palliative care teams.Building upon mentoring's mentee, mentor and organizational dependent, goal specific, context sensitive features highlighted in both recent reviews of mentoring this paper proffers a working theory of mentoring. Constructed Krishna's Mentoring Pyramid that underlines the 5 core elements of successful mentoring programs, we propose melding elements of the cognitive apprenticeship model with the adult learning theory using the multi-theories model of adult learning offers an effective starting point for a mentoring theory.More context-specific studies are needed to provide better insight into the validity of this framework in the ongoing pursuit of an interprofessional mentoring theory in Palliative Medicine.

Objective: Key to effective Palliative Care is interdisciplinary collaboration and holistic support of members of the multidisciplinary team. Mentoring is increasingly seen as being a critical facet of this process however; there is a dearth of guidance on establishing such a program within the Palliative Care setting. To fill this gap, this review analyzes mentoring programs in medicine, surgery, nursing and social work in order to identify key elements and common facets of successful mentoring programs that can be used to create a multi-professional mentoring program in Palliative Care. Methods:A review of systematic review of undergraduate and postgraduate mentoring programs in medicine, surgery, nursing and social work involving senior clinicians and junior doctors and/or medical students.Results: A total of 20 reviews were included. One review was on mentoring in medicine and nursing, 10 in medicine, 4 in surgery and 5 in nursing. There were no reviews of mentoring in social work. Thematic analysis revealed 3 themes, which were definition of mentoring, components of a mentoring approach and elements of the mentoring process Conclusion: Despite its context sensitive, goal specific and mentee-and mentor-dependent features, common features in mentoring in medicine, surgery and nursing lay the foundation for a learning theory of interprofessional mentoring that can guide construct effective mentorship programs.

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