Authors

• Ileana Šćepanović — University Hospital Centre Split, Split, Croatia — ORCID: 0000-0002-1423-7434
• Adrijana Livaja — University Hospital Centre Split, Split, Croatia — ORCID: 0000-0003-2408-0634

Keywords

mentor, mentor education, assessment and self-assessment of mentors

DOI

Full Text

Mentoring is a complex, interactive process that takes place between individuals of different levels of experience and expertise, in which the mentor gives support to colleagues or a student or mentor. In Croatia, a mentor in health care is usually considered an older, more experienced nurse with professional knowledge, experience, skills and knowledge of health care procedures. It is also necessary for the mentor to have other characteristics and features: high level of communication skills, teaching skills, respectability and support. The main goal of mentoring in nursing is to enable a student to become an independent, qualified healthcare worker with all the necessary competences and skills needed to achieve the highest possible quality of health care. There is no formal mentor training in Croatia but there is awareness of the importance of the mentor role to lead and support future generations of our nurses. ( 1 ) In addition to the lack of formal mentor training, there is also a feedback on mentoring work and self-assessment of mentors in order to improve mentoring practice. This is important because the students are mostly shaped by the mentor’s work and behavior. On the other hand, mentoring as a demanding and complex activity is often insufficiently recognized and valued. The most common difficulties in mentoring include academic and professional non-recognition of the role of a mentor, overload of nurses’ work, a large number of mentors mentored by mentors, insufficiently paid work of a mentor and lack of appropriate knowledge and skills that the mentor should have.