How Does the Implementation of a Mentoring Program that Utilizes the Essential Elements of Effective Mentoring Impact the Level of Job Satisfaction and the Retention of Faculty in a School of Nursing?
Raising competitive nurses who would soon take care of the country’s aging population has been proven to be a challenge because of the delicateness of the job and the amount of passion, dedication and hard work required to succeed. People tend to focus too much on the sacrifices that the students undergo in order to graduate and pass the licensure examinations and then finally become a registered nurse. What is usually overshadowed are the challenges that the faculty in charge of educating, training, and equipping the nursing students to become prepared for whatever type of clinical setting they may be immersed in in a real and professional setting. One of the biggest challenges that educational and clinical institutions offering nursing training programs and courses is the lack of regular and competitive nursing faculty members. Having an inadequate number of nursing trainers would definitely have a huge negative impact on the nursing students’ preparedness to be immersed in real clinical settings. In fact, this principle does not only apply to the educational system used in nursing but in other courses and disciplines as well.
The objective of this paper is to discuss the different possible impacts of a faculty mentoring program on the job satisfaction and retention of faculty members in a school of nursing. Naturally, the factors that would be discussed here are the mentoring programs, the job satisfaction of nursing school faculty members, and the faculty member retention and turnover rates among nursing schools. Fortunately, there is an abundant source of literature discussing and revealing other contributing factors related to the issue and how they affect the industry of nursing and allied medical care as a whole. Some of the best evidences can be found on academic journals. Majority of the literatures reviewed to back up the statements in this paper actually suggest that the implementation of a faculty mentoring program wherein more senior faculties guide, mentor, or coach if you will, the fresh members of the faculty, usually leads to positive results because such program reportedly increases the job satisfaction and faculty member retention rates in various nursing school settings .
White, Brannan and Wilson (2010) authored a two-part research about the feasibility and implications of a mentor-protégé program for new faculty members in a school of nursing. The first part of the study focused on the stories and experiences of the protégés while the second part mainly focused on the stories and experiences of the mentors. Of course, since what they have tried was a relatively new approach to handling a nursing faculty with a mix of senior and fresh members, some challenges were reported from both the sides of the mentors and the protégés. However, according to the authors, the challenges are too minute to consider, especially when we add the fact that the benefits of such program overshadow the challenges. One of the advantages of this program is that it is a double-edged sword. From the mentors’ point of view, the mentorship program enables them to learn as much as the protégés and vice versa when viewed from the protégés perspective.
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