Students’ knowledge of, and attitudes toward, mentoring: a case study at the Master’s Program in Health and Hospital Administration

INTRODUCTION Mentoring has been defined as a process whereby the mentor guides the mentee in personal or professional development. Few mentoring programs are available to prepare the qualified and scientifically trained administrators required to manage the rapidly expanding national health services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We wanted to measure the attitude and knowledge of the students of the Master's Program in Health and Hospital Administration toward mentoring. MATERIALS AND METHODS This is a cross-sectional survey, design study, conducted at King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The participants were students enrolled in the master's program. The dimensions of the questionnaire were demographics, knowledge about mentoring, understanding of mentoring, perception toward mentoring, attitude toward mentoring, experience with mentoring, and the need of mentoring. A Likert scale was used to measure responses. RESULTS Among 120 students, the response rate was 85%. In the domain of attitude toward mentoring, 92% of the respondents stated that mentoring is an effective method of developing their potential. The mean age was 30±4 years, 75.5% were female, 36% had finished at least two semesters, and 92% expressed a strong need for mentoring in the master program. CONCLUSION Mentorship is considered an important underutilized educational tool, which has great potential if implemented properly. Our university masters' students demonstrated a need for mentoring that we believe is a good platform to plan future development of mentorship programs.