Mentors do it with a conscience





The nurses in my research who mentored students in their workplace knew only too well what was at stake. They had a responsibility to their patients, colleagues, the health service and their profession to do a good job and make correct judgements about students. As they worked closely with students and befriended them to an extent (in order to help them to settle in and feel comfortable to ask questions, for instance), it could feel like a betrayal of trust tell them they weren't achieving. They did not hesitate to prevent a student from progressing in their training if they judged that to be the correct decision, but nevertheless their conscience could flood them with guilt feelings. The guilt could be associated with self-doubt - could I have done more to help them learn? It was also associated with anticipating the personal impact on the student, who had invested so much in their studies and in pursuing their nursing career. However, the guilt associated with making a decision that could potentially harm patients or the profession in the future was more persuasive.

However much the mentors could rationalise their judgements and decisions, they could not escape the 'call of conscience'. Philosopher Martin Heidegger proposed that humans are never fully at-home with themselves and constantly engage in anxious self-confrontation. To an extent, we can flee from this by inauthentically identifying ourselves collectively with a group, in which case we might tot up in a more detached way our 'good' and 'bad' actions. In being authentic, true to ourselves, we accept responsibility for our actions and there is always going to be some guilt, because we can never satisfy all needs. In taking one course of action, we cut off the possibilities for another. There is always something we didn't do.

Is this at all significant when coming to an understanding of the mentor experience? It is any more than an illustration of their humanity and a small window into the complexity of this and all human endeavours? I noticed that their conscience and their guilt would be formalised, at times when they softened the blow to a student by their careful construction of feedback, or in meticulous gathering of evidence to substantiate their decisions. It would be significant in less formal ways, such as in the way the mentors built allegiances with colleagues and used them as barometers for their mentoring judgements, or where they were 'looking over their shoulders' for anticipated student appeals against their decisions or fearing malicious gossip.

Maybe all I've done is to illustrate an aspect of human nature, but perhaps when we depend so heavily on mentors in the education of our student nurses, we need to be reminded that they are human and not simply commodities that feature in a numbers game.