Fecha de vencimiento y amortización de los valores

Each trust in the study had at least one practice-based post that focused on education, referred to as practice education facilitators (PEFs) in this report. The eight PEFs were asked about the

responsibilities involved in their post and for their views on many aspects of mentorship. This section provides an overview of their remit for mentorship.

Prior to taking up post they had had substantial clinical and educational experience and, as one of them put it:

“My background is clinical for a long time…So I was a mentor, and I’ve been a student a lot of times myself. So I feel that it gives me some insight into the role.” (TPEF 4)

The PEFs were line managed by a senior nurse in the trust with an educational remit and, in most instances, the one whom we interviewed. As well as their line manager, the PEFs’ working relationships with colleagues in their trust included managers of practice settings, mentors and other clinical staff and in some cases a placement allocations officer. Their main working

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and also the placement allocations officer for those in trusts linked with HEI-1. In the course of their work, PEFs attended a range of committees and working groups (detailed in Section 4.5) at which they met with trust colleagues and/or with HEI staff involved in the mentorship module and the pre- registration branch programmes. Some of these meetings also provided opportunities to meet with PEFs from other trusts associated with the same HEI. The PEF’s role thus entailed working with a network of colleagues across the trust and the HEI.

The essence of the PEF’s role was ensuring the quality of the learning environment and taking action to ensure that this was maintained; two of the PEFs expressed it thus:

“My role is to quality enhance and ensure the practice placement experience for students. To ensure that all our mentors meet the NMC standards.” (TPEF6)

“Part of our role is always keeping a lookout for whether or not that quality is sustained in a placement, and where it’s not we need to act to ensure that the students get a valuable experience wherever they go.” (TPEF 8)

In ensuring this quality, the interviews with PEFs revealed the diversity of activities that this entailed; these included specific tasks such as keeping the register of mentors up to date and running

workshops to prepare sign-off mentors as well as ongoing work in ensuring sufficient mentors in each setting and then supporting these mentors and their students. But their role also required a less tangible quality – the detailed knowledge of their ‘patch’; described in the words of one PEF:

“I see mentorship not as isolated but integrated with everything else. My role is very much operations based - so checklists of things like mentor updates. But also knowledge of what is going on in the clinical areas, what is happening to staff, to teams and to services which enables me to support mentors and students in a better way.” (TPEF1)

The responsibilities that PEFs described were grouped together as follows: ensuring capacity for mentorship; providing education for mentors; supporting delivery in practice; and developing materials and systems.

Capacity for mentorship

All the PEFs described their role in ensuring that placement and mentor capacity was sufficient to meet the needs of the HEI with which they linked. This included finding placements for the students allocated to the trust and in some instances working with an allocations manger (trust or HEI based) who decided broadly where students would go, with the PEF then making the detailed decision based on their knowledge of the current situation in each practice setting. Others were responsible for both the broad and the detailed level of decision-making. The number of staff in a practice setting able to mentor students was critical to whether the setting could be included in the

placement circuit and all the PEFs said that ensuring that there were enough mentors was a central part of their role. The register of active mentors was integral to assessing the ongoing capacity of placements to support students and ensuring that it was kept up to date fell within the

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Education of mentors - teaching on the course

None of the PEFs were currently involved in teaching on the mentorship course based in the HEI, although some reported involvement in developing its content in their capacity as members of a mentorship programme board. As part of their remit for supporting mentors, some PEFs specifically referred to supporting staff who were on the course by, for example, making sure that they were allocated a student for the practice-based component of the course.

Education of mentors – professional updating and sign-off mentor preparation

All the PEFs were involved in undertaking annual updating of mentors; one of the purposes of the mentor register was to indicate when each mentor had completed an update and hence the date when the next one was due. A varied approach to annual updates was evident; and included sole provision by PEFs, joint provision with link lecturers, face to face sessions and updating through written materials when the nature of the trust meant that mentors were widely dispersed. The trusts were at different stages in introducing sign-off mentors and hence sign-off mentor preparation. From the PEFs’ perspective, most were involved in providing sign-off mentor

workshops, often in conjunction with link lecturers. Triennial reviews were also at fairly early stage in most trusts and so the PEFs’ involvement was fairly limited at the time of the fieldwork.

Supporting delivery of mentorship in practice:

For all the PEFs, supporting the delivery of mentorship in practice was a key part of their role. Most of the PEFs provided induction sessions for students at the start of their course and in some trusts in their second and third years as well. They made sure that mentors could always contact them and so they could respond quickly when problems between a mentor and student needed resolving; for example over personality clashes or issues about student progress. All the PEFs had a role in auditing placements but the nature of their involvement varied depending on the input of link lecturers and trust-based staff such as ward managers and key mentors.

Developing materials and systems:

All the PEFs were involved in developing materials to support mentorship and as subsequent sections (4.6) and chapters will show, these included student induction packs, competency portfolios, and records for mentoring activities; sometimes this work was undertaken with other PEFs linked to the HEI but more often in collaboration with HEI colleagues. Some PEFs also

described particular initiatives which they had implemented in response to a perceived lack in their trust; examples included a review of mentor strategy best practice guidelines and a new system to ensure that mentor updates were done every year.