Implementation of a Mentorship Program for Emergency Department Nurse Practitioners

OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study to implement a Nurse Practitioner (NP) mentorship for new Nurse Practitioners to the Adult Emergency Department (AED) to increase retention through promoting role development, increasing satisfaction, and confidence of NPs in the AED.

METHODOLOGY
A 14-week pilot mentorship program was developed and implemented in the Adult Emergency Department following successful completion of departmental orientation. The program included four mentor-protégé pairs that completed an introductory workshop, weekly check-ins, face-to-face meetings every three weeks and closing workshop. The protégés and mentors completed pre/post-implementation tools including the Leadership Practices Inventory, Misener Nurse Practitioner Job Satisfaction Scale (Misener & Cox, 2001), Turnover Intention Score Roodt, 2004), Psychological Empowerment Survey (Spreitzer, 1992), and General Self Efficacy survey (Schwarzer & Jerusalem, 1995).

KEY FINDINGS
The author reports: When reviewing the mean of sums (out of a possible score of 60) for the domain: “Model the way, inspired a Shared vision, Challenge the process, enable others, and Encourage the heart”, there was an increase in four of the five areas. The most significant increase for the protégé group was the “Inspiring a shared vision” domain with an increase of 10.25. The only area that did show a decrease in numbers was enable others with a decrease in score 0.75. The mentor data showed an increase in all five domains from pre-implementation to post-implementation. The greatest increase for the mentor group was in the domain of challenge the process with an increase of 3.42 (p. 17).