Mentoring for surgical skills: a tool to share the workload.

© 2007 Association médicale canadienne R ecently, concern has been expressed that Canada’s current system for treating patients needing surgery is not sustainable in the long run. It has been suggested that the number of surgeons be increased or that nonphysician care providers be recruited to take on some responsibilities so that the efficiency with which the care is delivered can be improved. Mentoring has been used to develop a professional working relationship between one specialist and another to transfer the skills of a particular specialty. For example, allied health care specialists such as nurse practioners can develop a particular skill by finding a mentor in a surgeon or physician. Medical mentors have proven to be instrumental in developing advanced clinical roles for nurse practitioners, although with a caution that professional boundaries are to be defined and negotiated. The mentoring approach can be used to spread easily reproducible skills, such as skills in ambulatory surgery, to primary care physicians and nurses practising in the community or in the rural areas; similarly, it can be used to spread specialist surgical skills from surgeons in one centre to another. Apart from developing professional capacity, an obvious advantage of sharing the workload in overstretched, high-demand specialties is reduced wait times for elective and semi-elective surgical interventions. A mentoring program and a culture of mentoring in health care organizations also helps to retain medical and nursing staff. Mentoring is well established in other professions as a means of professional development. However, mentoring for doctors is a vague concept. Mentoring relationships are less readily applied, and agreed meanings and understanding are lacking, with many definitions of what “mentoring” actually means. Mentoring is a process whereby one doctor (the mentor) facilitates and encourages another doctor (the mentee) to develop his or her career, in light of his or her own priorities. Basically, it is an alliance of 2 people with varying degrees of experience to create opportunities for support and learning. A mentor is defined as: