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Mentorship for Health and Social Care Practitioner's

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Mentorship for Health Social Care Practitioner’s
Introduction:
Mentoring students in clinical practice is an important aspect of nursing. Nurses or mentors consider their profession to be practice based and work hard to ensure that a larger part of learning and assessment takes place in the clinical area. The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), 2006 defines the term mentor as, the role of the nurse, midwife or health visitor who facilitates learning, supervises and assesses students in the practice setting. While it is recognised that important learning happens in lectures including teaching of concepts, research and critical thinking skills, these are best integrated with skills during carefully supervised practice placements (Stuart, …show more content…

Therefore having resources central and readily available will empower students and staff to evidence base their work and enable students to improve on knowledge that is specific to the working environment they are placed in.
The NMC (2006) states that nurses who take on the role of mentor are required to support students’ learning in an inter-professional environment. An important opportunity identified by the analysis, was the chance for the student to be involved in multidisciplinary meetings and nursing handovers. In the case of multidisciplinary meetings, it gave the student the opportunity to observe and if appropriate participate. The student engaged in nursing handovers and this allowed her to observe the complexities of decision making in practice and recount her reasoning to colleagues.
Changes to the way NHS services are delivered have made it difficult to provide adequate clinical placements. As identified in the SWOT analysis, the author’s clinical setting is at threat of closure due to being an NHS residential campus. The NHS defines a Campus as a service that provides long-term care in conjunction to ownership and management of the housing. The ward is considered not good for people with learning disabilities to live, as it limits choice and gives poor outcomes. It’s recommended that all campuses should be reprovided by 2010. This would be of great detriment to pre-registration nurses, as this particular ward is the only specialist service

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