Nurse Practitioner as a Mentor

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Nurse Practitioner’s role as a Mentor
Orlando S. Valenzuela Jr.
University of North Carolina Greensboro
09/24/2012

Nurse Practioner as a Mentor

Introduction: Purpose of the Paper (this should be background information on nursing roles)

There has been a proliferation of roles for advanced practice nurse in the past several decades that include provider, mentor, educator, researcher, manager, and consultant roles. For the purposes of this paper I have chosen the role of a mentor. Mentorship has been defined as an intense relationship between a novice and an expert to promote role socialization and ultimately, role success of the novice (Hayes, 2005). The mentor acts as a guide, role model, teacher, and sponsor and provides knowledge, advice, challenge, and counsel for a new role (Harrington, 2011). The word mentor has its origin in the Greek mythology. In Homer’s Odyssey, Athena, the Goddess of wisdom, disguised herself as a man named Mentor to serve as a surrogate parent to Telemachus whose father, King Ulysses was away in the Trojan War. Athena guided and nurtured Telemachus who would later become the future king of Ithaca (Hayes, 2005). In nursing, mentoring has been defined as a situation that promotes personal and professional development in which general well-being is enhanced, synergy is increased, new insights are gained, perspective on the experiences is developed, balance is created and ways to succeed are discovered. This results in increased productivity and creativity on the part of parties, the mentor and the mentee (Barker, 2006). According to Grossman (2007), there are three primary components of the mentoring process: 1. career defined, which focuses on advancement in the organization by a mentor’s coaching, connecting the mentee to networks, protecting the mentee, and giving challenging assignments to the

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