Mentoring is important for the recruitment and retention of qualified nurse faculty, their ongoing career development, and leadership development. However, what are current best practices of mentoring? The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of a model for excellence in establishing a formal mentoring program for academic nurse educators. Six themes for establishing a formal mentoring program are presented, highlighting best practices in mentoring as culled from experience and the literature. Themes reflect aims to achieve appropriately matched dyads, establish clear mentorship purpose and goals, solidify the dyad relationship, advocate for and guide the protégé, integrate the protégé into the academic culture, and mobilize institutional resources for mentoring support. Attending to the six themes will help mentors achieve important protégé outcomes, such as orientation to the educator role, integration into the academic community, development of teaching, scholarship, and service skills, as well as leadership development. The model is intended to be generalizable for faculty teaching in a variety of academic nursing institution types and sizes. Mentoring that integrates the six themes assists faculty members to better navigate the academic environment and more easily transition to new roles and responsibilities.

The Institute of Medicine has called for more interprofessional collaboration between physicians and nurses. The purpose of this research was to compare the outcomes in affective and communication domains using a traditional (roundtable) model versus simulation in nursing and medical students. A prospective, descriptive survey design was used to collect data on 41 senior bachelor of science in nursing students, and 19 second-year medical students. The simulation strategy resulted in statistically higher levels of stress as identified by participants. In addition, nearly all participants reported having a better sense of the clinical role, and with 55 percent of participants stating that the experience changed their view of the role of the clinical team. This initial study indicates that interprofessional communication may be enhanced using simulation.

Health professions programmes are increasing the number of interprofessional events in their curricula. Many of these programmes are grounded in case study or simulation events in order to prepare students for eventual practice. We designed an interprofessional education collaborative practice (IPECP) that provides direct interprofessional practice experience while students are still in their health profession programmes. In our programme, teams of senior baccalaureate nursing and third-year medical students provided health coaching to patients in need of chronic disease management. The purpose of the project and study was to determine whether repeated exposure to opportunities for interprofessional communication would lead to improvement in the individual and team communication skills. Teams met with their assigned patients monthly to provide coaching and had follow-up conversations with the patients between meetings. Faculty were present at each meeting to review the healthcare and coaching plans, observe the teams' interactions, and provide a debriefing after each meeting. Results demonstrated that both individual and team communication skills significantly increased over time. The IPECP project was successful in providing a context where students could develop and improve upon key interprofessional communication skills.

Health promotion skills are a key component of most nursing education programs. While many curricula center around a singular health promotion project contained in one course, this nursing program saw the opportunity to use service-learning as a vehicle for developing a range of both health promotion and research skills. This report details a service-learning research program involving second and third year nursing students. Students conducted a community needs assessment, and designed, implemented, and evaluated health promotion programs that were developed as a result of the community needs assessment. Students collected data on the effectiveness of their programs through pre- and post-test design. Once in their statistics and research courses, students analyzed the data and prepared the data for presentation, developing their research skills. Results from the community on pre- and post-tests indicated significant gains in knowledge regarding hypertension and diabetes risk factors, prevention strategies, and intent to change behavior. Student outcome data was also collected and showed students perceived they had increases in the following skill sets: health promotion, assessment, civic engagement, and research.

Nurse educators can use the results of this study to target hiring and placing of desired characteristics of clinical instructors and to support mentoring programs that promote clinical teaching excellence.