Child Health Nurse Mentor’s perceptions of the effectiveness of a Mentor Preparation Programme
provide the background and rationale for a small-scale research project I will undertake shortly, which will evaluate the effectiveness of a nurse Mentorship Preparation programme. The aim is to ascertain whether the nurses who have completed the preparation programme feel it has been effective in preparing them for their role as mentors in their clinical areas.
The Mentor Preparation programme in question is run specifically for registered nurses at Edinburgh Napier University, and requires participants to complete a large portfolio of evidence, mainly theoretical. There is little practical assessment of their mentoring ability or skills in this programme which I suspect may be a significant flaw in the programme, and would like to find evidence to support this view. Despite the fact that the programme has run twice a year for five years it has never been formally evaluated , hence the gap in the literature which my study aims to fill. I am restricting my study to the perceptions of Child Health nurses who have completed the programme, because a wider study is already underway looking at the perceptions of Adult Health nurses who have completed it.
The literature review needs to include the general background and history of mentorship training and preparation in nursing, the rationale and evidence behind creating preparation programmes, and review any other literature relevant to the study. The Nursing & Midwifery Council (NMC)and NHS Education for Scotland (NES) are two essential sources which must be included in the review.