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An integral element of Ashworth Hospital's Management Development Programme for 80 first-line and middle-managers is the mentorship component of its Learning Support Programme. This article describes the background to and development of a comprehensive and sophisticated mentorship programme, involving internal and external mentors providing individual and group learning support opportunities.
The article derives much of its content from seminars arranged for both programme participants and their mentors delivered as part of the Management Development Learning Support Programme at the Ashworth Centre in Ashworth Hospital. It introduces the new ideas of "Strategic Mentoring" and "Senior Management Mentors" (SMMs) to "Action Learning Teams" (ALTs) to show the reciprocity that exists between "mentorship" and "empowerment".
Much has been said about mentorship in general and many schemes of nurse education and training have attempted to utilize the concept in practice. However, very little research work, especially with an evaluation focus as to its effectiveness as a tool of learning support, has been undertaken. Our own efforts at researching the national database literature show that there is a major gap in the literature in respect of "mentoring" in management development programmes for nurse managers.
This article attempts to address this balance in describing the development and implementation of a comprehensive mentorship learning support programme for first-line and middle managers in a Special Hospital[1].
That it is difficult to find guidance and advice, based on sound evaluation of the use of mentors in management development programmes for nurse managers, should come as no surprise when, "One of the problems surrounding the issue of mentorship is that there appears to be no common agreement as to the role and function of the mentor" (Morle, 1990, quoted in[2]). In their article, Armitage and Burnard go further, "If we do not have an agreed definition, we cannot assume that we are talking about the same thing when we refer to mentorship. If this is the case, we cannot have a unified system of mentorship training nor can we develop general policies of organising mentorship"[2].
Before delving further into this "definition quagmire"[3] and providing clear statements of difference of meaning between "mentoring" and "preceptorship" -- terms which are seemingly used interchangeably both in theory and practice -- let us begin at a common point...