Mentoring
Mentoring is an important follow-up to the classroom training, providing important one-on-one support of the community matron in the field setting. The Nurse/Matron will be sent a questionnaire prior to the mentoring session.
Our mentoring focus is to facilitate change in the role of advanced nurses, community matrons, rapid response teams and district nursing teams, and impact the continued growth and development of existing PCT programmes. It is designed to focus on enhancing competencies and skill level of the individual nurses. We recognise that various team members may be at different stages of development; therefore mentoring will be adapted within the context of the workforce and competency standards. We utilise competency inventories through which we establish our mentoring activities and agendas. These inventories identify specific measurable skills critical to the role and are designed to measure successful performance and role adoption and to evaluate training effectiveness.
Ongoing field-based mentoring facilitates the development of skills that support the use of integrated case management processes and techniques to care for patients with the highest risk of chronic illness. Mentoring provides critical one-on-one support of the community matron/case managers in the field setting. This component is crucial to facilitating the modelling and demonstration of newly learned skills. While classroom training is helpful, our experience has shown that the mentoring process is the critical success factor in building the skills and self-confidence of staff in this more autonomous and clinically extended role. Field mentoring can best assist the staff to build the critical thinking skills necessary to manage the highly complex long-term condition patients.
Telephone Mentoring
Telephone mentoring can be provided to aid development and build confidence.