In any other organizational field, the expertise of mentors is deemed as an influential factor in shaping a leader’s future. Strongly adopted and promoted in the realm of business leadership, the nursing profession has explored the beneficial implications of mentorship among nurses to help alleviate nursing shortage and retention. Mentoring relationships in nursing usually occurs at the higher educational level of nurses.
However, the mentorship relationship in nursing can be deemed necessary in the aspect of enhancing mutual careers through the early stages, and later on a nurse’s profession. Mentoring programs are furthered studied and explored to gain measurements on its efficacy and relevance in addressing pressing issues and concern in the nursing profession. Some literature reviewed for this paper maintains that it is possible to initiate mentor-protege relationships in the early stage of nursing professionals.
As several studies have suggested (Murdaugh (1998), Glass and Walter (2000), and Thompson (2000)), mentoring provides personal and professional growth which shares a process to learn, care, reciprocate, commit, and friendship between the relationship shared by a mentor and his or her protege. Mentoring programs in the US Mentoring programs has been explored over the years and is not a trend currently which has recently emerged in the nursing profession.
Although extensively adapted in business context, mentoring programs have been introduced in the 1990’s to various medical groups and organizations (Buddeberg-Fischer and Herta, 2006). Most mentoring programs started in the nursing field, but slowly penetrated the field of medical students and doctors as years passed. According to Buddeberg-Fischer and Herta (2006), there exist several mentoring models: the classical one-to-one mentoring, small group mentoring supervised by a mentor, individual or group mentoring with a number of mentors or the multiple-mentor experience model, and mentoring among co-equals or peer mentoring.
Literature review suggests that different mentoring programs studied across time have specified both long and short-termed goals and aims. Aside from providing guidance and support during the earlier phase in professional immersion, mentorship programs has yielded relationships which has helped in personal and career growth and development in various mentor-protege relationships.