Preceptorship and Mentorship
1Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
2College of Nursing, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada
3School of Nursing, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada
Preceptorship and Mentorship
Description
Health professional students or beginning professionals have benefited from the guidance, coaching, supervision, and teaching of a more experienced practitioner. Typically, the word preceptorship is used to describe a practitioner - student pairing for a designated period of time to assist students in meeting their learning objectives. The location of learning can be anywhere in the world. For workplace learning relationships between novice nurses and their more experienced colleagues, mentorship is the term most often used. This relationship can evolve informally or involve a formal program whereby a mentor is assigned to a beginning professional for a designed period of time. After formal mentorship and preceptorship programs, students and their preceptors or mentors will often continue their relationship informally. In the past thirty years, a robust body of literature has begun to emerge focusing on various aspects of this relationship ranging from preparation, satisfaction, competency development, emotions, critical thinking, and learning outcomes. Researchers have studied preceptors and preceptees, and mentors and mentees using both quantitative and qualitative methods.
This issue will be dedicated to original research and review articles that address either preceptorship or mentorship primarily in the area of nursing. Given the movement to interprofessional education, if articles from the other health professions but still involving nursing are submitted, the editors will review them as well. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- Preceptor preparation and support and development of effective methods of preceptor preparation and support including the use of technology
- Evaluation during the preceptorship experience including issues such as clinical evaluation, the integrity of the evaluation process, and the use of pass/fail grading
- The pedagogical foundation of the preceptorship model of teaching/learning
- The student perspective on preceptorship and mentorship, including how students can be prepared to be precepted/mentored
- Preceptorship within the intergenerational context
- Preceptorship as a method for knowledge translation
- The use of preceptorship in the preparation of advanced practice nurses
- Mentorship as a means of preparing and supporting novice nursing faculty
- The theoretical foundation for preceptorship/mentorship including theories of teaching/learning, relational processes, and mentor intelligence
Please note that there can be confusion regarding the terminology of preceptorship and mentorship. The authors will define these terms in the issue.
Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/nrp/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable: