Effect Of Treatment Of Nursin Students By Hospital Staff On Their Learning Ability

Overview

Basic nursing education must furnish starting nurse practitioners with the skills, knowledge, and judgment to grant effective, ethical, and safe nursing care. Being a self-regulatory profession, with Medical colleges serving as its regulating body, nursing arranges standards for educational training and credentials of individuals taking on the profession

Mentoring refers to the activity wherein experienced nurses, who serve as mentors, helping the less-experienced, as well as experienced nurse learners to adapt to novel settings and ad hoc responsibilities (Kucey, 2001, p. 8). Mentoring typically involves the establishment of long-term relationships, necessitated to cultivate the passing on of knowledge, insight, and competencies. It is different from preceptoring, which generally engages in short-term relationships, for mere teaching of certain skills and for clinical supervision (Hynes-Gay & Swirsky, 2001, p. 12). Successful mentoring necessitates time and considerable personal commitment. In most cases, mentoring is undertaken by existing hospital nursing staffs that have a considerable amount of experience of the ins and outs of working in the hospital setting. Thus, the ultimate goal of mentoring nursing students is to immerse them in actual duties they are expected to carry out in their projected nursing career. The immersion process involves practical and hands-on activities, as supervised by the mentors, in order to familiarize the nursing students with the kind of work that are expected out of them when they graduate and take on the profession.

The notion of mentoring in nursing education is not entirely new. Nurses have long engaged in both informal and formal mentoring relationships. Nevertheless, in recent years, due to rapidly evolving practice environmentsвЂ"escalating patient acuity and unceasing nursing shortagesвЂ"experienced nurses have been less involved with mentoring tasks with novel nurses. Hence, the need for nurse mentoring today is unprecedented as patient care complexity increases, and medical technology advances.

Successful mentoring is indeed beneficial in many ways. Nurses who have had previous formal or informal