Implementing a Mentorship Program for Pharmacists Integrating into Family Practice: Practical Experience from the IMPACT Project Team
Authors: B. Farrell; L. Dolovich; Z. Austin; Sellors Connie
Year: 2010

Mentorship has long been used in many disciplines, including those in health care, to help foster skill development and to provide advice, coaching, nurturing, inspiration and support. Mentorship is a formal or informal, mutually supportive relationship between 2 or more people (often a senior and junior person), which enhances personal and professional growth and development. It is a voluntary, mutually benefi cial, and usually long-term professional relationship. Mentoring approaches have been associated with many positive personal and career outcomes, including greater professional identity and competence, increased career satisfaction and acceptance within organizations, decreased job stress and role confl ict, and improved retention rates. Mentorship can be useful in reducing stress when practitioners adapt to change as they take on new roles. One new area of pharmacist practice is within a group primary care practice. Data gathered from pharmacists and physicians involved in conducting or reviewing pharmacist consultations carried out in primary care practices as part of the Seniors Medication Assessment Research Trial (SMART) identifi ed that pharmacists found their expanded role in practice challenging. Pharmacists felt that additional support and training would better equip them to work within a primary care setting. We used learning and mentoring guides to develop a formal mentoring program for pharmacists as they integrated into group family practices in the IMPACT (Integrating family Medicine and Pharmacy to Advance primary Care Therapeutics) project. In this article we present a description of our experience with the components of the IMPACT Mentorship Program. As a project team, we learned a great deal about the successes and challenges of implementing a mentorship program. We have drawn from our project management experience, which included weekly project management meetings and monthly mentor meetings, and documentation (e.g., meeting minutes, mentor documentation logs), to describe our learning. We have also selected some illustrative quotes from this documentation, from interviews conducted with mentors following their participation in an initial training workshop and from narrative reports completed monthly by the IMPACT pharmacists. All of the quotes taken from interview transcripts, narrative reports and project documentation are used with consent and approval from the McMaster University, University of Toronto and Élisabeth Bruyère Research Institute research ethics boards. Importantly, this article does not represent a qualiAbstract Mentors can help people build confidence in unfamiliar situations or stimulate profession growth in familiar situations. We hope this description of our experience with the mentoring component of IMPACT will help readers use mentoring approaches to help each other continue to move forward confidently with patient-focused care. Les mentors peuvent aider les personnes à avoir davantage confiance en elles dans des situations inconnues ou à favoriser leur épanouissement professionnel dans des situations qui leur sont familières. Nous espérons que cette description de notre expérience avec le mentorat dans le cadre du projet IMPACT aidera les lecteurs à recourir aux démarches de mentorat pour toujours être plus compétents et confiants dans les soins axés sur les patients. C L I N I C A L R E V I E W