Nursing Mentorship Critical Reflection

The Nursing and Midwifery council (NMC) standards of proficiency for pre-registration nursing education (2010) sets out exactly what student nurses must achieve to enable registration onto the first part of the register. Another NMC publication; Standards to support learning and assessment in practice (2006) lays out what a post registration nurse requires to fulfil in order to formally assess student nurses. These two sets of standards make it clear what is expected of both students and mentors when learning in the clinical environment. This makes the process of mentoring sound simple, however, the reality of working on a busy ward coupled with staffing shortages and low morale makes this a complex and challenging task (Ref). As a post registered nurse with two years clinical experience I am well aware of the constraints and stresses on the other side in which nursing staff must work under. Despite this, mentoring is also a very rewarding aspect of nursing (Ref). As someone who has experienced highs and lows throughout my nurse training I promised myself that I would make every effort as a future mentor to make the learning experience in my company as positive and advantageous to my mentees as possible. To that end, this essay will be a critical reflection of my experience of mentoring a pre registration student nurse on a busy surgical ward. I will begin with a brief introduction to mentorship before covering my main topics which will be; The mentor student relationship, and the process of giving feedback. In order to maintain structure, reflect appropriately and learn from my experience I have chosen to use Gibbs model of reflection (Annex 1) to detail my experiences.

One of the recurring themes in preventing the development of a standard definition of good mentors, is the lack of coherent guidance on what mentors should be and should do or how they should behave (Clutterbuck 2004). Authors views of what makes a good mentor often conflict or at best

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