Mentoring practices in physical and occupational therapy: experiences of Canadian mentors and mentees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to (a) gain an understanding of physical therapy (PT) and occupational therapy (OT) mentoring practices that occur in two large Canadian clinical teaching institutions, (b) understand how novice professionals are integrated into the workplace, and (c) examine the meaning that mentors and mentees attach to their mentoring experiences.The literature demonstrates that formal mentoring outcomes include building research competence (Byme & Keefe, 2002), strengthening personal and professional growth (Connor, Bynoe, Redfem, Pokora, & Clarke, 2000), contributing to an individual's academic career development (Pololi & Knight, 2005) and most importantly, promoting job satisfaction and retention (Smith, McAllister, & Snype-Crawford, 2001; Solomon, Salvatori, & Berry, 2001). The fact that no evidence with regard to physical and occupational therapy workplace mentoring exists inspired this study. This study examined the mentoring practices of five physical therapists and five occupational therapists working in two different university affiliated institutions. Using purposive sampling, six mentors with more than five years of experience, and four mentees with less or equal to one year of experience were recruited. Three in-depth interviews, and a concept mapping exercise followed by debriefing sessions in a focus group format, constituted the primary sources of data. Participants' and researcher's journals, and artifacts, such as memos, photographs, and interviews with four administrators/directors, completed the data collection. QSR Nvivo software was used to store and organize the data. The constant comparison method (Maykut & Morehouse, 1994) was utilized first to analyze the data. Thirty-two interview transcripts (526 pages) were coded to obtain conceptual themes. Categorization of data highlighted similarities and differences. Then, to triangulate the data, four participants' journals and interview and focus group transcripts were analyzed in depth using Lieblich's (1998) holistic-content approach. Using a narrative analysis approach allowed me to connect the data and constant comparison to explore the relationships and patterns across data (Maxwell & Miller, 2008). Narrative summaries were produced to represent a comprehensive view of four mentees and mentors' unique experiences; I used the ghostwriting approach to represent the narratives (Rhodes, 2000). The high expectations placed upon newly graduated professionals (McCloughen & O'Brien, 2005) coupled with the human resources shortage in the fields of PT and OT in Canada, render mentoring an essential element for hiring and retaining healthcare professionals. This study revealed that mentors facilitate the professional rite of practice of novice professionals by guiding them in choosing a profession, learning the ropes, and ultimately integrating them into the workplace. The findings demonstrated that previous clinical placements helped novices adapt to the workplace culture and assisted them with issues of place identity. In addition, this study highlighted the importance mentoring plays in constructing PT and OT professional identity. It showed that mentors and mentees working in complex healthcare settings all struggle, although in different ways, with the high demands of their jobs: However, with mentoring, they find ways to balance work and personal life. Finally, the results showed that the implementation of more formal mentoring programs might facilitate the integration of PT and OT professionals into the workplace, and suggested that institutions need to invest in these programs if they want to improve retention of their healthcare professionals, who are presently in higher demand than the existing supply.
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 imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".