378 ■ III: ROLE FUNCTIONS OF DOCTORAL ADVANCED NURSING PRACTICE
MENTORING IN PROFESSIONAL NURSING
We might consider Florence Nightingale as the first mentor of professional nurses. She
mentored Linda Richards, considered the first professional nurse in the United States,
who trained in 1877 at Nightingale’s training school St. Thomas Hospital in London
(Wayne, 2014). Ms. Richards then returned to America and established several nurs-
ing schools in the United States. Mentoring is recognized as an important facilitator
of nursing scholarship, as well as socialization to the advanced nursing practice role
(Chism, 2013; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2012). However, in recent years, nurs-
es in advanced roles have been faced with a paucity of mentors. This situation is due to
a confluence of events, including the nursing shortage, the nursing faculty shortage, the
proliferation of distance learning and online classes, new roles for doctorally prepared
nurses as primary health care providers, and lack of inclusion for underrepresented
nurses.
The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) emphasizes the
need for mentoring/ precepting/ supporting new doctorally prepared nurses. They
suggest that doctoral programs for nurses, including DNP programs, recruit faculty
and preceptors from a wide variety of disciplines for these positions. In this way, all
doctoral students have exposure to other role models and mentors when no nursing
mentor is available (AACN, 2015a). The Council of Graduate Schools also reported
that during exit surveys, mentoring was identified as essential for doctorate com-
pletion (Council of Graduate Schools, 2009). Nurses in doctoral advanced practice
are prepared to take the lead in mentoring qualified candidates in order to establish
a pipeline of competent and confident health care providers, scientists, educators,
and researchers.
■ MODELS OF MENTORSHIP AND MENTEESHIP
IN THE NURSING PROFESSION
A number of mentoring models have been described in the nursing literature,
and most can be categorized as: traditional, group, team, peer and, most recently,
e- mentoring, which would be mentoring through e- mail, teleconferencing, or the
internet (Garringer et al., 2015). Traditionally, mentoring in nursing has either oc-
curred informally or as a planned program where the individual is matched with
an experienced nurse in a formal one- to- one program. Although such programs
can benefit nurses, the shortage of graduate- degree nurses means that many will
miss out on the opportunity to support professional growth and development of
new nurses, particularly new doctoral graduates. Further, mentoring dyads do lit-
tle to enhance the more collaborative atmosphere now prevalent in professional
nursing and health care settings. Alternative nontraditional mentoring approaches
such as team, peer, multifaceted, or group, then, can provide advantages to the
traditional approach. Deciding how doctoral students and new graduates can best
be supported is critical given the diverse populations and complexities in contem-
porary health care and the need for interprofessional collaboration (Chism, 2013).
Therefore, doctorally prepared graduates may need multiple mentors to develop
their new roles, or they may need several mentors in succession, as they grow into
and develop new roles.
There are fewer mentorship models particularly designed for doctorally prepared
nurses, but selected models have been adapted or can be adapted to meet this need. For