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Record W4416061609 · doi:10.1080/10872981.2025.2579079

Near-peer mentorship for newly qualified doctors; what are the benefits, and what methods can be used to overcome the pitfalls?

2025· review· en· W4416061609 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Patrick J. McGown, Jennifer Forshaw, Lisa Gould

Bibliographic record

VenueMedical Education Online · 2025
Typereview
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicMentoring and Academic Development
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMentorshipMatching (statistics)TUTORCognitionPatient care

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

INTRODUCTION: Access to mentorship is frequently cited as a priority for doctors, however formal mentorship programmes throughout training are lacking for residents. Near-peer mentorship is a faculty-light option to potentially bridge this mentorship gap, however the literature in the clinical postgraduate setting is not comprehensive. We aim to evaluate the benefits and pitfalls of near-peer mentorship in a postgraduate setting. MATERIALS AND METHODS: of near-peer mentorship were applied. After allocation to the frameworks' overarching themes, data was analysed thematically. RESULTS: Across 10 identified studies (one quantitative, three qualitative, six mixed-methods), near-peer mentorship was perceived to be beneficial (72-100% approval), with 85-99% of mentors and mentees desiring continuation of schemes at their units (seven UK-based, two Australian, one Canadian). The main themes identified were Mentee benefits, including careers advice and development of transferable skills; Mentor benefits, including leadership and organisational skill improvements; Organisational benefits, including reduced faculty workload and an enhanced sense of community. Pitfalls included a perceived lack of mentor expertise, shortage of time and resources, and unsupportive mentoring relationships. DISCUSSION: This research suggests that near-peer mentorship offers benefits for the mentee, mentor and organisation, if care is taken to mitigate the potential pitfalls. The main benefits versus traditional senior faculty mentorship derive from the concept of social and cognitive congruence, whereby a more closely relatable tutor is better able to tailor learning in terms understood by the tutee. Practical recommendations to optimise near-pear mentorship include mentorship pyramids, matching of pairings within the same clinical sites, and a hybrid matching approach with the option for mentee-led selection.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.006
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.006
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.913
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0060.006
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.163
GPT teacher head0.508
Teacher spread0.345 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreReview

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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