Extending Mentoring in Palliative Medicine-Systematic Review on Peer, Near-Peer and Group Mentoring in General Medicine

Abstract

A shortage of trained mentors in Palliative Medicine has inspired efforts to employ near peer, peer and group (NPG) mentoring to supplement traditional novice mentoring or mentoring between senior clinicians and junior doctors and or medical students as a means of ensuring that holistic support is available to mentees in a timely, appropriate and personalised manner. Scrutiny of prevailing data on NPG mentoring however, reveals significant gaps in understanding and practice of NPG mentoring that has precipitated conflation with preceptorship, rolemodeling, sponsorship, supervision and counseling. A failure to consider mentoring's evolving, goal-sensitive, context-specific and relational, mentee, mentor and organizational-dependent process nature has further limited available NPG mentoring research. This review seeks to advance a clinically-relevant understanding of NPG mentoring that will help delineate the practice of NPG mentoring and potentially see it blended with novice mentoring. Methods: The literature search on NPG mentoring in internal medicine was performed on publications across Embase, PsycINFO, ERIC, PubMed, Medline and Scopus databases for articles published between January 2000 to December 2015. The BEME guide and STORIES statement were used to develop a narrative. Results: 1456 citations were reviewed, 8 full text of articles were included and 4 themes were identified through thematic analysis including definitions and descriptions, the structure, the benefits and the obstacles to NPG mentoring. Conclusions: These themes allow for the first evidenced based definition of NPG mentoring. In proffering a means to blending NPG mentoring with novice mentoring, the data suggests the need for effective mentor and mentee training and a flexible structure to the mentoring process that will cater for changes in the evolving relationships but allow effective oversight of the process. Key to this blending process is also maintenance of a social and friendly atmosphere underlining the importance of mentoring environments and highlighting areas for future research.