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Mentors 12/13/06 12:57 PM Page 10 Nurturing Nurses Growing nurses need care and feeding, too. How one mentorship program is getting results. by bonnie ho A fter earning his nursing degree and passing the Boards in 2004, Wally Daniels started working in a pediatric intensive care unit, but quickly found that the job wasn't as he imagined. He said that some of his coworkers, instead of supporting him as a new nurse with advice and understanding, were more interested in initiating him onto the unit by giving him a hard time. Working among tragically sick children made him paranoid about his own children's health, questioning their every fever. And Daniels was entering the female-dominated world of nursing after a first career in the male-dominated world of construction. All these challenges contributed to a difficult transition. "It's a different world," said Daniels of nursing. He's now a registered nurse on a medical-surgical-orthopedicsoncology unit at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, Calif., a different facility than where he first started nursing. "It's a frightening world where you have a lot of responsibility and a lot of accountability for the patient's safety. You're frequently the last stop on the way to some kind of event that could turn out badly or positively for a patient." With so much pressure, said Daniels, he felt he needed, but lacked, the trust of his colleagues. "Going into nursing is a place where a lot of people get chewed up, where you start out and have a terrible time," he said. "For me, I didn't want to be one of those people." In June 2005, he tried his hand at nursing again, but in adult patient care. This time, Daniels found a mentor through the pilot nurse mentorship program run by the California Nurses Foundation (CNF), an Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to maintaining and improving the quality of nursing. The two nurses had a lot in common. Daniels' mentor had also worked in construction prior to nursing, but had 10 more years of nursing experience. Daniels was 10 REGISTERED NURSE able to talk openly with his mentor, bouncing off his ideas and observations about the differences between construction and nursing. He got to develop his clinical skills, such as practicing starting IVs together, and even got help exploring which unit was best for his career. Daniels stayed, and has now been nursing for two years. A recent evaluation of CNF's pilot nurse mentorship program shows that Daniels' situation is not an isolated case. Preliminary two-year data of the program analyzed in April 2006 showed that newly-hired RNs who did not participate in the mentor program were seven times more likely to leave their hospitals than RNs at those same hospitals who participated in the program. These promising results have excited the nursing and hospital communities, and the program's reputation is growing. Students in nursing schools from across the country have been sending inquiries to the Foundation website, according to CNF program director Anna Mullins, RN. They want to know once they graduate which hospitals will have a mentorship program. "As far as we can tell, this is not only the first time a mentorship program that relies on leadership from veteran staff RNs themselves has been implemented in this country, but it is rare to collect solid data that shows the effectiveness of mentoring for staff nurses of any kind," said Mullins. "We are beginning to show it works." With successful preliminary results, expanding the program will be a priority in coming years, according to CNF staff. W W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G NOVEMBER 2006