Experiences and mentoring needs of novice nurse educators at a public nursing college in the Eastern Cape

The nurse educator role is challenging to novice nurse educators and even more so when mentorship is lacking or ineffective. Novice nurse educators who enter the academic world are expected to demonstrate knowledge of both the clinical and classroom environment. Such an expectation creates role strain, stress and frustration. Mentorship has proved to make this entry easier. There appears to be a lack of mentorship for newly-appointed nurse educators in most schools and/or departments of nursing at higher education institutions in South Africa. This phenomenon prompted the researcher to investigate the experiences and mentoring needs of novice nurse educators with the goal of making recommendations on the mentorship of novice nurse educators. A qualitative, exploratory, descriptive, contextual design and phenomenological approach was used to explore and describe the experiences and mentoring needs of novice nurse educators at a public nursing college in the Eastern Cape. Purposive sampling of nurse educators with less than five years’ experience at a public nursing college in the Eastern Cape, South Africa and with no experience, or less than one year’s previous experience as a nurse educator at any other nursing education institution (NEI) was used. Data was collected using face-to-face, semi-structured individual interviews and unstructured observations. Sixteen in-depth, semistructured interviews that were digitally recorded provided saturated data that was then transcribed verbatim. To ensure that the study was trustworthy, the researcher used Guba and Lincoln’s criteria, namely: credibility, confirmability, dependability and transferability. Ethical standards were maintained throughout the study as the researcher complied with the ethical principles: respect for persons, beneficence and justice. Tesch’s method of thematic analysis was used by the researcher and the independent coder to analyse data and to draw meaning from the content. The five themes that emerged from the data were: novice nurse educators experience challenges related to theoretical mentoring; novice nurse educators experience challenges related to clinical mentoring; novice nurse educators experience a lack of orientation; novice nurse educators experience a lack of resources and novice nurse educators provide recommendations in order to optimise the experience and performance of the novice nurse educators in their first year of teaching at a nursing college. The results of the study reveal that novice nurse educators have reservations about their experiences. Their insights on how their mentoring needs could have been realized were incorporated into recommendations for the mentoring of novice nurse educators. These recommendations can be adopted at local, provincial, and national levels