Diagrama de Proceso

5.5.2./

Lack of contact with the mentor caused students and mentors to question the validity of the assessment.

Mentors often make up what goes into the booklet, they may not understand the booklet, not know you or even work with you (SQ).

and

Credit is often not given in booklets and is often not reflected in the grading systems used in the booklet (SQ).

Mentors felt unable to give valid judgements on students with whom they had worked only infrequently. Questionnaire responses strongly endorsed this view (Appendix 4 table 33).

One mentor said:

If I’m a mentor for somebody and I’ve only seen him once, I’ve got to do his report in the next week, and I say, how can I do his report when I don’t know him? (MFG)

This mentor felt that she was being asked to do an impossible task in assessment when the student was with her for so short a time. Others, however, described a team-work

approach with all staff who had taught the student contributing to the assessment: The whole of the nursing team need to discuss the students’ performance so they can all help with their learning. (MQ).

5.5.22

Both mentors and students, when discussing the assessment booklet, described this document as hard to understand and confusing. This caused some mentors to fear that they were not assessing properly:

The booklets tend to be seen as badly written and hard to understand and on some placements mentors are reluctant to fill in the booklets (SQ). and another said:

I feel the assessment booklet should be much less complicated. I do not understand what I am supposed to be assessing (MQ).

5.5.25

Mentors and students considered the varied interpretations made of the document rendered assessment unreliable.

The assessment booklet should be written in plain English as different people will interpret things in different ways (MQ).

This student was concerned that the grading system did not allow credit to be given in areas that she considered to be important:

It’s not just those grades, it’s what they write about you; those grades don’t tell you anything about whether you turned up on time, whether you were dressed correctly, whether you were polite ... I think that is just as important as those grades (SFG).

Many others expressed similar sentiments, indicating that there was no scope to differentiate between those students who just achieved a pass standard and those who performed to a higher standard. Questionnaire data from both students and mentors strongly endorsed the difficulties experienced with the documentation (Appendix 4 tables 34-37).

5.5.3 Students who Fail to Achieve 5.5.3.1

Failing a student is understandably hard for any mentor and it is unsurprising that the majority found this stressful (Appendix 4 table 38). Some mentors responding to the questionnaires stated that they would be prepared to fail anyone whom they did not consider to be a safe practitioner. This demonstrated a high degree of professionalism. Others, while indicating that they were prepared to do this, clearly found it unpleasant. One mentor put it this way:

I would like to find it easy to fail a student if they were unsatisfactory; however, personal feelings such as feelings of failure or misjudgement make this impossible (MQ).

5.5.3.2

The questionnaire responses sampled a much wider range of staff than the focus groups. The time gap meant that many questionnaire respondents would have had time to

consolidate experience of mentoring and assessing. Both of these factors may account for those mentors who expressed professional views in the questionnaires. This was not universally the case, and students and mentors described some staff nurses who resort to giving pass grades rather than engage in the trauma of failing a student who was seen not to be achieving the required standard:

I feel that occasionally the mentor fills in the assessment booklet and passes the student, just to make it easier for themselves (SQ).

and

I feel that a lot of people on other wards loathe to be honest with students and on a couple of occasions students have arrived here and been allowed to pass all their previous allocations when it appears that they are not competent to have passed (MQ).

5.6 Off Duty and Time Issues

5.6.1 Overview of Off Duty Issues

5.6.1.1

It can be argued that ‘time and off duty’ does not constitute a separate category, as these issues affect other areas, particularly stress and assessment. The author feels that not using a separate category is to fail to give these issues the emphasis that they deserve. This is an area that has historically always been of concern, as can be demonstrated from the

literature (Marson 1981, Orton 1981, Gott 1984, Melia 1982 in the UK and Wright 1990 in Australia). The area falls into three aspects (fig 5.12). These are: getting together, which outlines the problems of the student and mentor actually being together on the same shift; working together, which explores what may happen when the two are rostered on the same shift and optimum time, which looks at what proportion of a student’s placement it is desirable to spend working one to one with the mentor.