Mentorship: A Return to Basics

Abstract

For a busy medical educator, mentorship is often eclipsed by the "urgent and important" priorities of rules, competency milestones, and other content-related mandates that we need to teach. Yet we all know-from the time we are born-that relationships are key in teaching and learning new things. Relationships keep us motivated and provide us with role models for what is expected and meaningful personalized feedback about how we are progressing towards these expectations. As sophisticated as our televisions and computers have become in showing humans communicating and in capturing human language, children still need actual humans to learn language. In our specialty, we also know that children with normal global intelligence but a social developmental delay (e.g., autism spectrum disorder) are often delayed in learning language and other skills, but can learn effectively with the right teaching approaches.Most people who have achieved great things (in both real life and in fiction) are more likely to cite the names of the people (or quasi-people, in the case of fairy tales and science fiction movies) who inspired and mentored them than the names of the competencies that they incrementally achieved. Although milestones are important for ensuring fundamental competency and safety of practice, mentorship is what is needed to maintain inspiration and engagement in learning.Several examples from the everyday world show where mentorship is important in ensuring that "urgent and important" things get done. Many of the complex tasks in our specialty are effectively taught in a mentoring context; one example (and especially important in the diverse state of Hawai'i, where the first author is privileged to live) is discussing our own cultural background and how it affects interactions with patients (which program directors may readily recognize as PROF1 4.2 [1]). In the first author's experience, whenever faculty complain to him that certain mature psychiatric skills-such as accurately judging who needs an admission for safety and who does not-are not possible to teach, he often challenges them by asking whether this skill could possibly be any more "un-teachable" than purposefully navigating, without any instruments other than the five senses, across thousands of miles of open ocean to reach isolated islands: a skill learned effectively, after several centuries of its absence in Hawai'i, by a determined Native Hawaiian man from a revered Micronesian mentor [2].In the training context, constructive feedback (e.g., when competencies are not quite met) is generally much more effectively given and received if there is a baseline relationship that is established and nurtured. Relationships are the foundation-albeit hidden, at times-upon which the rules and rituals of academic psychiatry become meaningful. The challenges we face day-to-day with students, residents, and other supervisees are often rooted in tensions (avoidable or not) in relationships of one variety or another.Along with helping their mentees achieve great things,...

Coaching and mentoring: an overview for trainers in psychiatry

“…Some of these are structural and some ideational. Hawkins (2012) has described the creation of a coaching culture and some of the barriers to this.…”