Spring is late this year. The snowdrops are still in full bloom and the daffodils are yet to grace us with their show of bright yellow, even the early ones, so St David's day came and went in a more subdued way, botanically speaking, than in recent years. The waxing and waning of the seasons provides an anchor, a way of grounding human experience. Today is the "ides of March", the thought of which fills me with a tiny sense of forboding, but not being superstitious, I don't attach any real significance to this.The idea of place and time as being meaningful is often uppermost in my thoughts as I work with my research data. The different environments in which nurses work have an enormous impact on how they experience their work and their mentoring. A busy surgical ward presents a range of opportunities, challenges and constraints to a mentor that are quite different from a rehabilitation unit or a community nursing team. Whatever the setting, they all experience certain things that frustrate their efforts to be a good mentor and can strain their relationships with students and colleagues, along with the things that make their work worthwhile and that they feel passionate about sharing with students.
The work context dictates the pace of the work. The experience of time is very different in the different contexts and time dictates the rhythms of the work, the priorities that are constantly juggled and the affordances available to mentors to be with and support their students. Physical space is also significant - whether they can physically see the student at any time; whether there is a space for a private conversation; or how close is too close when working together. How these mentors feel about being a nurse, and nursing, in the context of their own lives is often an overarching driver for how they approach mentoring.
