The core of mentorship: medical students' experiences of one-to-one mentoring in a clinical environment

Abstract

Mentoring has been used in different health care educational programmes, but the core of mentorship, i.e., facilitating the development of medical students' professional competence, has not been explored in depth in the literature. In order to create effective and meaningful mentoring programmes, there is a need for deeper knowledge of the meaning of formal mentorship and, for this, the students' experiences are important. A mentoring program was set up where all medical students were offered a mentor during their first clinical courses; years 3-4. The mentors were physicians and their role as mentors was to support the students and act as sounding-boards, not to teach or assess knowledge. This study aimed to get a deeper understanding of the meaning of mentorship seen from the perspective of undergraduate medical students. A qualitative approach with individual interviews (N = 12) and inductive content analysis was chosen to investigate and interpret the meaning of mentorship. The results comprise three overarching themes: Space, Belief in the future and Transition. Having a mentor gave a sense of security and constituted a 'free zone' alongside the undergraduate programme. It gave hope about the future and increased motivation. The students were introduced to a new community and began to identify themselves as doctors. We would argue that one-to-one mentoring can create conditions for medical students to start to develop some parts of the professional competences that are more elusive in medical education programmes, such as reflective capacity, emotional competence and the feeling of belonging to a community.

Continuous mentoring of medical students provides space for reflection and awareness of their own development

“…Meaning units were then condensed, entered into QSR NVivo 921 and sorted into three domains guided by the themes in our former study: space, belief in the future and transition. 13 The unit of analysis for this paper was from the space domain; remaining data will be reported in a separate paper. Data were coded using predetermined codes with great openness for new codes for data that did not fit into the former coding scheme.…”

“…Data were coded using predetermined codes with great openness for new codes for data that did not fit into the former coding scheme. 13 All the predetermined codes according to the space domain were used, but for the main part of the data, new codes were created (Table 1). SK sorted and coded data manually in QSR NVivo 9.21 Codes were then categorised and interpreted into themes.…”

“…In a former qualitative study by our group, medical students experienced one-to-one mentoring as a space alongside the educational programme where their motivation and belief in the future increased and their process of transition and feeling of belonging to a new community was enhanced. 12,13 That form of mentoring created conditions for development of one's reflective capacity, emotional competence and the feeling of belonging to the community of physicians. 12,13 But can other designs of mentoring programmes enhance students´ development of these more 'elusive' competences in a similar way?…”

“…12,13 That form of mentoring created conditions for development of one's reflective capacity, emotional competence and the feeling of belonging to the community of physicians. 12,13 But can other designs of mentoring programmes enhance students´ development of these more 'elusive' competences in a similar way? This paper focuses on formal mentoring for medical students´ professional and personal development.…”

Reassessing the educational environment among undergraduate students in a chiropractic training institution: A study over time

“…Mentoring can play a role in providing emotional support, advice, and encouragement. 61 Kahlen et al 62 showed that mentorship can provide psychosocial support and facilitate students' professional identity and personal development.…”