A scoping review of mentor training programs in medicine between 1990 and 2017

Krish Sheri,Jue Ying Joan Too,Sing En Lydia Chuah,Ying Pin Toh,Stephen Mason,Lalit Kumar Radha Krishna

doi:10.1080/10872981.2018.1555435

Abstract

ABSTRACTEffective mentoring enhances the personal and professional development of mentees and mentors, boosts the reputation of host organizations and improves patient outcomes. Much of this success hinges upon the mentor’s ability to nurture personalized mentoring relationships and mentoring environments, provide effective feedback and render timely, responsive, appropriate, and personalized support. However, mentors are often untrained raising concerns about the quality and oversight of mentoring support.To promote effective and consistent use of mentor training in medical education, this scoping review asks what mentor training programs are available in undergraduate and postgraduate medicine and how they may inform the creation of an evidenced-based framework for mentor training.Six reviewers adopted Arksey and O’Malley’s approach to scoping reviews to study prevailing mentor-training programs and guidelines in postgraduate education programs and in medical schools. The focus was on novice mentoring approaches. Six reviewers carried out independent searches with similar inclusion/exclusion criteria using PubMed, ERIC, EMBASE, SCOPUS, Google Scholar, and grey literature databases. Included were theses and book chapters published in English or had English translations published between 1 January 1990 and 31 December 2017. Braun and Clarke’s approach to thematic analysis was adopted to circumnavigate mentoring’s and mentor training’s evolving, context-specific, goal-sensitive, learner-, tutor- and relationally dependent nature that prevents simple comparisons of mentor training across different settings and mentee and mentor populations.In total, 3585 abstracts were retrieved, 232 full-text articles were reviewed, 68 articles were included and four themes were identified including the structure, content, outcomes and evaluation of mentor training program.The themes identified provide the basis for an evidence-based, practice-guided framework for a longitudinal mentor training program in medicine and identifies the essential topics to be covered in mentor training programs.

Highlights

Novice mentoring dominates the mentoring landscape in medical education [1–6] and has been found to enhance innovation and career progression [7–15], encourage research involvement amongst women and underrepresented ethnic minorities, boost grant success [16], and publications [10,17–23] and navigating the complex landscape of academic life [2,24–27]
Envisioning that the content of the scoping review will guide future research into mentor training, we considered the comprehensiveness and feasibility of these tools given the longitudinal nature of the mentoring process and the mentor training program
The stakeholders were presented with the table created as part of Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) descriptive-analytic method [88]. This contextualised and quality appraised data enhanced discussions with stakeholders and garnered their views on the relative importance of a mentor training program, the cost-effectiveness and viability of implementing the findings and aided input into focus for future studies. This scoping review highlights the increasing importance placed upon mentor training [95] in novice mentoring [7–11,15]

Summary

Introduction

Novice mentoring dominates the mentoring landscape in medical education [1–6] and has been found to enhance innovation and career progression [7–15], encourage research involvement amongst women and underrepresented ethnic minorities, boost grant success [16], and publications [10,17–23] and navigating the complex landscape of academic life [2,24–27]. Despite its success and expanded use in medical education, clinicians are poorly trained in the art of mentoring [24,34]. Mentors often fail to maximise mentoring opportunities [24,34]. Acknowledging this gap, Geraci and Thigpen (2017) emphasised the need for mentor training where mentors ‘engage in self-reflection and assessment to determine if they have the attitudes, personal qualities, knowledge and skills and can regularly demonstrate the behaviours that are needed to maximize protégé success’ [39]. Mentor training [11,40,41] enhances the effectiveness of the mentoring process [19,23,39,42,43], increases mentoring competency [3,4,11,44–48], improves mentor satisfaction [49], and boosts staff retention [3,4,46,50]

SHERI ET AL

Study design

Findings

Discussion