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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Mentorship in Academic Medicine is an evidence-based guide for establishing and maintaining successful mentoring relationships for both mentors and mentees.
Drawing upon the existing evidence-base on academic mentoring in medicine and the health sciences, it applies a case-stimulus learning approach to the common challenges and opportunities in mentorship in academic medicine. Each chapter begins with cases that take the reader into the evidence around specific issues in mentorship and provides actionable messages and recommendations for both correcting and preventing the problems presented in the cases.
Accompanying the text is an interactive, online learning resource on mentorship. This e-tool provides updated resources for mentors and mentees, including video clips and podcasts with effective mentors who share their mentorship tips and strategies for effective mentorship. It also provides updated departmental and institutional strategies for establishing, running, and evaluating effective mentoring programs.
Mentorship in Academic Medicine provides useful strategies and tactics for overcoming the common problems and flaws in mentoring programs and fostering productive and successful mentoring relationships and is a valuable guide for both mentors and mentees.
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Seitenzahl: 298
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
How did we get interested in mentorship?
Who are the potential readers of this book?
Is this book about the theory or practice of mentorship?
How is this book organised?
Where did we get the evidence for the material in this book?
What other mentorship resources are available to complement this book?
References
Chapter 1: What is the evidence for mentorship?
Your first step in this task is to gather the evidence; specifically, what's the case for mentorship?
What is mentorship?
Who are the targets for mentorship?
What is the impact of mentorship?
Gaps in the evidence
References
Chapter 2: What are the characteristics and behaviors of effective mentors and mentees?
Effective mentors
Effective mentees
Productive mentoring
How many mentees can effective mentors mentor?
Gaps in the evidence
References
Chapter 3: How can you initiate mentorship?
How do you find a mentor?
How should you structure your mentoring relationship?
What should happen in the first meeting with your mentor?
Gaps in the evidence
References
Chapter 4.1: Some effective mentoring strategies and tactics: Part 1: Mentorship meetings, priority setting, and time management
Strategy 1: Holding regular meetings, with pre-agreed agendas
Strategy 2: Establishing mentees' academic and social priorities and the time-management tactics required to meet and balance them
References
Chapter 4.2: Some effective mentoring strategies and tactics: Part 2: Protecting mentees from “dys-opportunities”
How to say “No” (nicely)
References
Chapter 4.3: Some effective mentoring strategies and tactics: Part 3: Mentoring for knowledge generation
Stage I. Steps to take before mentees meet with colleagues who can help them
Stage II. The mentee's meeting with their R&R team
Stage III. Re-writing the application
Stage IV. Re-submission of the application
References
Chapter 4.4: Some effective mentoring strategies and tactics: Part 4: Mentoring for knowledge dissemination
Audio-visual presentations
Publications
Stage I. Steps to take before mentees meet with colleagues who can help them
Stage II. The mentee's meeting with their R&R team
Stage III. Re-writing the paper
Stage IV: Resubmission
A note on abstracts submitted to scientific meetings
Teaching
References
Chapter 4.5: Some effective mentoring strategies and tactics: Part 5: Mentoring for promotion, protection, and job prospects
1. The timely achievement of milestones in mentees' academic progress
2. Creation and maintenance of an effective curriculum vitae
3. Creation and maintenance of an effective teaching dossier
4. Protection from sharks
5. Getting the right next job
6. Deciding when a mentee should become a mentor
A role-model mentor
Appendix A: Dr. Bryant's responses to our survey questionnaire
References
Chapter 5: How can you assess, diagnose, and treat mentorship that is in trouble?
Trouble from failing to meet or failing to meet agreements
Trouble from abuses of power
Trouble from true love on an unequal footing
References
Chapter 6: How can you initiate and maintain a mentorship progam?
How do you assess the need for mentorship in your department?
How do you assess the barriers and facilitators to implementation of a mentorship program?
How do you develop and implement the mentorship program?
Gaps in research
References
Chapter 7: How can you evaluate the impact of a mentorship program?
How do you measure the impact of your mentorship program?
References
Chapter 8: How can you scale up and sustain a mentorship program?
How do you scale up a mentorship program at your institution?
How do you sustain a mentorship program at your institution?
References
Index
This edition first published 2014, © 2014 by John Wiley & Sons.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Straus, Sharon E., author.
Mentorship in academic medicine / Sharon E. Straus and David L. Sackett.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-118-44602-7 (pbk.)
I. Sackett, David L., author. II. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Mentors. 2. Education, Medical. 3. Faculty, Medical. WB 18]
R735.A1
610.71— dc23
2013022741
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.
Cover image: Istockphoto.com; © wickedpix 2012 and © wbritten 2009.
Cover design by Rob Sawkins for Opta Design Ltd.
Acknowledgements
We have learned a huge amount from our mentors, mentees, friends, and colleagues about mentorship and we thank them for their ongoing support and inspiration. We thank Jennifer Deevy for obtaining permissions to reproduce some of the tables in this book, and we thank David Newton both for his hard work in organizing our mentorship survey results, and for his genius in creating the website (www.mentorshipacademicmedicine.com) that accompanies this book. Dario Sambunjak and Mitch Feldman generously provided both insights and feedback on early drafts of Chapters 6 and 7 respectively. Vic Neufeld, Donald Cole, and Lehana Thabane reviewed drafts of the book and provided us with thoughtful feedback on its contents.
We thank each of our amazing colleagues who not only serve as role models of excellent mentorship, but took the time to tell us how they did it through completion of a survey (and are allowing us to share their insights and expertise with you). They include: Paul Armstrong, Jesse Berlin, Mohit Bhandari, Dianne Bryant, John Cairns, Bill Clark, Rebecca Clarke, Deborah Cook, Gary Cutter, Dave Davis, Simon Day, Julian Desmond, John Eikelboom, Justin Ezekowitz, Brian Feldman, Amit Garg, Hertzel Gerstein, Paul Glasziou, Christian Gluud, Charles Goldsmith, Vladimir Hachinski, Robert Hart, Brian Haynes, Brenda Hemmelgarn, Carl Heneghan, Asbjørn Hróbjartsson, Clive Kearon, Andreas Laupacis, France Légaré, Sandy MacPherson, Bonani Mayosi, Maureen Meade, Cindy Mulrow, Jock Murray, Jim Neaton, Andy Oxman, Barry Pless, Don Redelmeier, Roberta Scherer, David Simel, Peter Szatmari, Shaun Treweek, Andrew Vickers, Allyn Walsh, and James Ware.
Sharon would like to particularly thank her family for their patience and support. She gives special thanks to Jeremy Grimshaw, Brian Haynes, Andreas Laupacis, and Arthur Slutsky who continue to provide her with mentorship.
Much of Dave's contribution to this book is an expansion of his ‘Clinician-trialist rounds’ column in the journal Clinical Trials, and he thanks its editor, Steve Goodman, for shepherding that enterprise. Individual “rounds” were guest-led by Sharon, Peter Szatmari, and Andy Oxman, and frequently incorporated comments from fellow trialists the world 'round.
Introduction
We reckon that few academics would argue against the importance of mentorship in academic medicine; after all, you're reading this introduction! As we hope to convince you in Chapter 1, effective mentorship is a major determinant of academic success and both job and life satisfaction. However, although most studies of academic faculty suggest that they want mentorship [1–3], there are lots of academic settings in which less than 20% of them get it. In recognition of this yawning gap, many academic health institutions are developing mentorship programs and, in doing so, have recognized the paucity of educational as well as administrative resources to educate and support both mentors and mentees. We wrote this book to help meet this need.
How did we get interested in mentorship?
Sharon became interested in mentorship while completing a research fellowship at the University of Oxford under Dave's supervision. At their first meeting, Dave asked her to outline her career goals as well as those for her research training. Dave's response changed her life: he told her that his job was to make sure she achieved what she wanted in her fellowship and to support her in the development of her career path. This altruism was role modeled throughout the next few years and Dave's amazing mentorship skills and expertise directly influenced her career and her own attempts at mentorship. When preparing to leave Oxford and begin her first faculty position, Sharon asked Dave how she could ever repay him for what he'd given to her and his immediate response was, “Do the same for others.” Now, after mentoring more than 50 graduate students and new faculty, Sharon states that one of the most fulfilling parts of her job is to be able to interact with and learn from her mentees. It is these experiences, plus the scarcity of resources describing how to develop and support mentorship, that led to several research projects and, ultimately, to this book.
Dave, akin to Molière's Monsieur Jourdain1, was getting mentored for years before he knew it. Beginning in a US medical school in 1958 (back when man still had 48 chromosomes), and in his internship, first medical residency, and nephrology fellowship, he was “adopted” in turn by a bench scientist, a chair of medicine, and a nephrologist who didn't simply recruit him into their bailiwicks as an extra brain and pair of hands to be “supervised.” Instead, and in turn, they took time each week or so to challenge his ways of thinking about what he “knew” and might be able to find out about human biology and clinical medicine, to open doors to the places (“restricted” labs and graduate courses) where he might learn how to find those things out, to critique and improve his plebeian writing and speaking skills, to explore his career interests and ambitions, and to help him think how he might pursue them through his next career moves. Twenty-five years later, after getting educated about mentoring and instituting it at a new Canadian medical and graduate school, his seventh mentor helped him think through and implement his second medicine residency. He's now on his tenth mentor and gazillionth mentee, and beginning to get the hang of it [4].
Who are the potential readers of this book?
We have written this book for aspiring academic researchers and educators (whom we'll hereafter call mentees) and those experienced, empathic persons who guide them in the development and re-examination of their own ideas, learning, and personal and professional development (whom we'll call mentors). We are academic physicians (namely, we are subspecialists in internal medicine and geriatric medicine and don't presume to be experts in other clinical areas) who have largely worked in North America and the UK. Most of our mentees have been physicians, but we have mentored people from various disciplines including nursing, medicine, rehabilitation therapy, biostatistics, health informatics, education, and engineering amongst others and from different career paths including clinician educators, researchers, and administrators. While there is some material in this book that is relevant to anyone working in an academic institution, we don't to pretend to be experts in mentorship for other types of clinicians and academics (such as those in other clinical disciplines or career paths) or for those working in low and middle income countries, and we encourage them to identify (or create) mentorship resources that outline issues unique to their mentorship needs. We invite these readers to share these resources with us via our website (www.mentorshipacademicmedicine.com) and to lead discussions on the website about which contents from the book are useful to them and which ones aren't relevant. In the literature review that we conducted to inform this book, most of the articles focused on mentorship for clinician scientists. We found less research that targeted clinician educators and clinician administrators and thus our discussion of mentorship for academics following these career paths is not exhaustive. Again, we encourage our readers to send any relevant research targeting these individuals to our website.
We have targeted our book primarily at mentoring in academic institutions. Accordingly, we have viewed our readers and their interests, goals, aspirations, opportunities, resources, challenges, and dilemmas through that lens, and at both the individual and institutional levels:
At the individual mentor–mentee level, we've presented the best evidence we could find on what they should look for in each other, how they should find each other, how they should treat each other, how they should plan and run their mentoring sessions, and how they should identify and manage the opportunities, challenges, and problems mentees encounter as they launch their academic careers (including how to fix or sever mentorships that aren't working).
At the institutional level, we've presented the best evidence we could find on how to assess an institution's need for and interest in mentoring, how to develop a mentoring program and train mentors, and how to evaluate it, correct its faults, and sustain it. While most of the literature focuses on clinician scientists, we have included information for other career paths whenever we have found it. Similarly, although most of the evidence focuses on mentoring trainees and junior faculty, we've addressed issues for senior faculty whenever possible.
Is this book about the theory or practice of mentorship?
There are some brilliant people who are continuing to develop a theoretical basis for mentoring [5, 6]: we are not among them. This book is about the practice of mentoring.
How is this book organised?
This book employs a case-stimulus learning approach:
Each chapter begins with a scenario for the reader to ponder and solve.
Next, comes the best evidence we could find about the issues raised in the scenario.
Finally, we close with some evidence-based, actionable solutions to the challenges presented in the scenario.
Where did we get the evidence for the material in this book?
We identified the evidence in each chapter from three sources:
Because the GRADE system [7] doesn't yet have a scale for assessing qualitative literature, we used a modified version to describe the validity and “trustability” of the evidence we present in each chapter. In brief, we labelled evidence as high quality when we are highly confident that the true effect of the mentoring intervention lies close to that estimated in the publication. For example, evidence is judged as high quality if all of the following apply:
there is a wide range of studies included in the analyses with no major limitations
there is little variation between studies
the summary estimate has a narrow confidence interval.
We judge evidence as moderate quality when we consider the true effect is likely to be close to the published estimate of the effect, but there is a possibility that it is substantially different. For example, evidence might be judged as moderate quality if any of the following applies:
there are only a few studies and some have limitations but not major flaws
there is some variation between studies
the confidence interval of the summary estimate is wide.
Finally, we judge evidence to be low quality when the true effect may be substantially different from the published estimate of its effect. For example, evidence might be judged as low quality if any of the following apply:
the studies have major methodological flaws
there is important variation between study results
the confidence interval of the summary estimate of the effect is very wide [7, 8].
What other mentorship resources are available to complement this book?
We are supplementing and updating the contents of this book on our website at www.mentorshipacademicmedicine.com. As this book was being published, it included:
a mentorship checklist
an individual development plan
interviews with various mentors
some mentorship scenarios.
A major portion of this website will provide updates of new evidence for each chapter so that readers can see what's new or different since the book was published. We'll update this evidence-base by repeating our systematic reviews. Furthermore, we'll translate any new, valid evidence into new, effective strategies and tactics for mentees, mentors, and institutions.
We invite you, our readers, to take over2 the website.
When you come across moderate- or high-quality evidence on mentoring that we missed in preparing this book, please add it to the website. For example, we've worked mostly in academic centers in high-income countries, and we'd welcome contributions from colleagues who are mentoring in other settings such as those in low-income countries.
When you have had a particularly positive or negative experience in mentoring or being mentored, please add it to the respective chapter, telling the rest of us what you think its “active” principle was so that we can duplicate or discard it accordingly.
When you find important gaps that we simply failed to cover, let us know.
And we always appreciate having this book's errors (including typos, misspellings, and other goofs) identified and corrected.
References
1. Genuardi FJ, Zenni EA. Adolescent medicine faculty development needs. J Adolesc Health 2001; 29: 46–49.
2. Wise MR, Shapiro H, Bodley J, et al. Factors affecting academic promotion in obstetrics and gynaecology in Canada. J Obstet Gynaecol Can 2004; 26: 127–136.
3. Palepu A, Friedman RH, Barnett RC, et al. Junior faculty members' mentoring relationships and their professional development in U.S. medical schools. Acad Med 1998; 73: 318–323.
4. Sackett DL. On the determinants of academic success as a clinician-scientist. Clin Invest Med 2001; 24: 94–100.
5. Ragins BR, Kram KE. The Handbook of Mentoring at Work: Theory, Research and Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2007.
6. Bozeman B, Feeney MK. Towards a useful theory of mentoring. Adm Soc 2007; 39: 719–30.
7. Guyatt GH, Oxman AD, Vist GE, et al. GRADE: An emerging consensus on rating quality of evidence and strength of recommendations. BMJ 2008; 336: 924–6.
8. GRADE Working Group. Available from: http://www.gradeworkinggroup.org/ Accessed Sept 20, 2012.
1 …who exclaimed: “Well, what do you know about that! These forty years now I've been speaking in prose without knowing it!” Molière: The Bourgeois Gentleman, 1670.
2 The usual standards for website participation will be employed, and you are free to sign your contributions (and be acknowledged for them) or remain anonymous.
Chapter 1
What is the evidence for mentorship?
Your first step in this task is to gather the evidence; specifically, what's the case for mentorship?
In this chapter, we'll set the stage for our mentorship discussion providing the definitions and terminology that we'll use throughout this book. In particular, we'll outline the scope for our discussion, including what mentorship is and isn't, and help you to provide the “case for mentorship” based on the relevant evidence. We invite you to join us in this dialogue via the website (www.mentorshipacademicmedicine.com) that accompanies this book; we'd love to hear about how you define mentorship and how you would meet the challenge we posed in the above scenario!1
What is mentorship?
The concept of mentorship can be traced to Greek methodology. Odysseus placed his much older friend Mentor in charge of his palace and of his son Telemachus when he left for the Trojan War. Interestingly, Athena disguised herself as Mentor on several occasions to provide guidance to Telemachus. It was from this story that the term “mentor” was taken and began being used to mean a trusted, senior advisor who provides guidance to a more junior person.
Moving along to more recent times, there are many definitions of mentorship, including those from business [1] and psychology literature [2], but our focus in this book is on academic medicine, including clinicians who work in universities and academic health science centres. So, for our discussion, we'll use the definition commonly cited in academic medical literature:
A process whereby an experienced, highly regarded, empathetic person (the mentor) guides another (usually younger or more junior) individual (the mentee2) in the development and re-examination of their own ideas, learning, and personal and professional development. The mentor, who often (but not necessarily) works in the same organization or field as the mentee, achieves this by listening or talking in confidence to the mentee [3].
One element that we think is missing from this definition is that mentorship is about an exchange between the mentor and mentee and provides benefits to both parties; we'll explore these benefits later in this chapter.
Berk and colleagues have further elucidated the concept of mentorship to specify that it can range from an informal, short-term relationship to a formal, long-term relationship [4]. Informal mentoring is a relationship between individuals that develops without organizational interventions and is the natural “coming together” of a mentor and mentee. For example, a resident may identify a staff physician with whom they worked on a clinical rotation and developed a good rapport; this interaction may lead to a series of conversations that ultimately results in a mentoring relationship. Formal mentoring is initiated (in some places, mandated!) by an outside party or organization, as when a department chair not only requires that each new recruit has a mentor but makes sure that they get one.
A common source of confusion in the mentorship literature is that the term “mentor” is often used interchangeably with the term “role model” or “coach.” We maintain that these are very different concepts. “Role modeling” is a “passive, observational learning model in which an individual attempts to emulate observed, desirable behaviours and qualities” [5]. Indeed, there may be no personal relationship with the role model, and they are often oblivious of their role! Of course, a mentor can and often does serve as a role model, but that's just one, passive facet of their function. Similarly, mentoring goes far beyond “coaching” a junior colleague on the performance of specific tasks and skills [6]. This latter function is often the complete extent of an aspiring academic clinician's interactions with their research supervisor or department chair. We found an interesting analogy (for anyone who has seen Star Wars) that nicely highlights this difference: “Yoda is a coach, teaching Luke how to use the Force, and Obi-Wan Kenobi is a mentor, showing him what it means to be a Jedi knight” [7].
Who are the targets for mentorship?
Much of the literature on mentorship focuses on targeting junior or new faculty members [8–10]. However, faculty at any stage in their career can benefit from it.3 A large qualitative study (moderate-quality evidence) of clinician researchers across two universities documented that senior (or established) faculty often feel that they are neglected and should have equitable access to mentors [11]. We also found a descriptive study of a mentorship program developed in a Department of Pediatrics at an academic medical centre that targeted mentorship activities not only to junior, but to mid-career and senior faculty [12]. Their survey of mid-career (associate professor level) department members found that respondents commonly wanted mentoring around the requirements and timelines for promotion, about how to redefine their careers, and how to network effectively (they were less interested in advice from mentors on how to transition to administrative positions) [12]. Senior faculty wanted mentoring around how to transition towards part-time opportunities and retirement, and on financial and succession planning. These results highlight that as a mentee's career progresses and evolves to take on different responsibilities or change career paths, different sorts of mentoring may be required. For example, a mentee's emerging interest in administration or education may require mentoring skills beyond those of their earlier clinician–scientist mentor.
In academic medicine, clinicians can have different career paths including those of a scientist, educator, or administrator, and having this career flexibility is one of the privileges and pleasures of academic medicine. Interestingly, surveys and qualitative literature (moderate-quality evidence) suggest that clinician investigators are both more likely to seek mentorship and more comfortable asking for it than are clinician educators [8–10]. This difference may be because clinician investigators have completed research training, are already used to having research supervisors, and are “primed” to seek the greater benefits of mentors. These studies also suggest that clinician educators are more likely to have difficulty with promotion than clinician scientists, raising the possibility of a causal relationship [8–10]. Throughout this book, we will identify differences in mentorship issues for each of these career paths whenever we find them in the literature.
What is the impact of mentorship?
Mentorship claims to develop and maintain faculty who are productive, satisfied, collegial, and socially responsible. However, not only are there no randomized trials of mentorship; we doubt we will ever see one, since it would be both methodologically and ethically challenging to randomize clinicians to either receive a mentor or be denied access to one.4 Accordingly, we based this section on the results from three systematic reviews of the literature [8–10], updated by more recent literature searches to the first week of March 2012. Studies of any design were eligible for inclusion, but the final selection was restricted to English-language reports targeting academic medical faculty.
Much of the evidence base is summarized in a quantitative systematic review that explored the impact of mentoring on career choices and academic advancement [8]. It included 42 articles describing 39 studies (34 of which were cross-sectional self-report surveys). A second systematic review of the qualitative literature on mentorship identified 9 relevant studies [9]. Since the publication of these reviews, we identified an additional 13 eligible studies:
7 surveys [13–19]
2 nested case control studies [20, 21]
1 uncontrolled before-and-after study [22]
1 case series [23]
2 qualitative studies [24, 25].
Most of the evidence base comes from cross-sectional surveys of academic clinicians who had or had not been previously mentored. The methodological shortcomings of such studies must be recognized. Specifically, if mentored academics are more successful in these observational studies, possible explanations for their success extend beyond mentoring, and include the possibility that they were destined to be stars from birth and therefore had a selection advantage in getting access to superior training programs that provided coincidental but unnecessary mentoring. And, the majority of the studies that we've found to date were done at a single site and didn't follow mentees' careers over a sufficiently long period of time.
Bearing these caveats in mind, there appear to be career- and life-benefits of mentorship to both mentors and mentees. We'll explore the benefits to mentees first:
1.Academic clinicians who got mentored reported greater career satisfaction [moderate quality evidence; 14–16, 22, 26]. Mentorship not only influences career choice [10, 24], it influences job satisfaction. For example, in a survey of faculty from 24 US medical schools, faculty members with mentors had significantly higher career-satisfaction scores (62.6 vs 59.5 on a 100-point scale, p < 0.003) than those without mentors [26]. Similarly, in a survey of gastroenterologists in the US, having a mentor was a predictor of job satisfaction (odds ratio of 2.32, p < 0.001) [15]. And, in a survey of mentors and mentees from the Psychiatry Institute at King's College, London, having a mentor was associated with greater job well-being [22]. In contrast, Stamm and Buddeberg-Fischer have followed a cohort of Swiss medical school graduates for more than seven years with both repeated surveys and a nested case-control study and showed that having a mentor was not predictive of job satisfaction [20]. However, mentorship did predict self-perceived career success [20].
2.Academic clinicians who were mentored got more research grants [moderate quality evidence; 27, 28]. Mentorship can enhance productivity. For example, a survey within a nested case-control study found that mentored primary care fellows were two to three times as likely to be a principal investigator on a research grant [28].
3.Academic clinicians who were mentored reported more protected time for scholarly activities and produced more publications [moderate quality evidence; 17, 26, 29–31]. A survey of more than 3000 faculty members in the US found that those with a mentor had more time allocated to research (28% vs 15%, p < 0.001) than those who didn't have a mentor [26]. In another study, survey respondents who had a mentor were more likely to allocate more time to research and were more productive in research in terms of their numbers of grants and publications [28].
4.Academic clinicians who were mentored were promoted more quickly [moderate quality evidence; 8, 18, 32]. Not surprisingly, given that mentorship is associated with greater productivity of academic outputs, mentorship seems to facilitate academic promotion. For example, a study of Canadian obstetrics and gynecology fellows found that those who reported that they had a mentor were more likely to achieve a promotion (hazard ratio 2.3; 95% confidence interval 1.36–3.99) [32]. Surveys in the US, Canada, and Germany found that the absence of effective mentoring was a major obstacle to a successful academic career [8]. In a small survey of 12 faculty, Daley and colleagues found that having a senior mentor was a factor in determining promotion [18].
5.Academics who were mentored were more likely to stay at their academic institutions [moderate quality evidence; 33]. Mentorship may play a key role in recruiting and retaining staff in academic medicine. For example, in a two-tiered program consisting of one year of preceptoring new faculty (to orient them) plus mentoring junior faculty who had been there for at least a year, 38% of junior faculty who did not form mentor partnerships left the organization, compared with 15% of those who did [33].
6.Academic clinicians who were mentored reported greater academic “self-efficacy” [moderate quality evidence; 13, 22]. Academic self-efficacy is defined as the belief in one's ability to succeed in academic medicine. A survey of faculty members at the University of California, San Francisco reported that those who had a mentor reported significantly greater academic self-efficacy than those without mentors [13]. Similarly, Dutta and colleagues found that having a mentor was associated with both self-efficacy and self-esteem [22].
There is less literature available on the impact of mentorship on mentors, and we identified just two recent studies that explored this issue [22, 34]. In a survey of mentors for medical students, mentorship was reported to reinvigorate interest and lead to personal and professional growth [34]. In their before-and-after study, Dutta and colleagues documented mentors' enjoyment in being able to help solve mentees' problems, “to give back,” provide support, see their mentees develop, and in using the mentorship to reflect on their own careers and skills [22].
Gaps in the evidence
As we emphasized at the outset, there are no randomized trials of mentoring. While completing a multi-centered randomized trial of mentorship would be challenging, we repeat our invitation to colleagues who might wish to collaborate in designing and executing the stepped wedge cluster randomized trial described earlier in this chapter. Short of this, longer-term cohort studies of aspiring academics, with and without mentors, which examine the impact of mentorship on the retention, productivity, ability to mentor others, quality of life, and satisfaction of mentees would shed important additional light on its risks and benefits.
