Correspondence:

Mentorship in contemporary practice: the experiences of nursing students and practice mentors Aim. This paper explores the role of the mentor in contemporary nursing practice in the UK. It presents findings from a recent study which investigated the impact of a locality-based nursing education initiative on students, practice mentors and aca-demic staff and draws on another study, conducted in the same setting and two Australian sites, to examine the perceptions of nursing students and mentors. Background. Within nursing, mentorship is integral to students ’ clinical placement experiences and has attracted increasing interest among researchers. Despite a plethora of studies focussing on mentoring and its nature and application within the practice setting, limited attention has been paid to the extent to which guidelines provided by regulatory bodies for nursing inform and influence the practice of mentoring in contemporary health-care settings. Design. The study used a two-phased design with data on mentorship being focussed on the second phase