Australian Midwifery Students\u27 Views about Profession-Specific Peer Mentoring

Midwifery is one of the most demanding professions there is, and midwifery students can find coping with the practice aspect of their course difficult. Mentoring is one way of supporting health clinicians’ emotional wellbeing; to date however, there is little research on mentoring for midwifery students. In this study, the aim of which was to discover midwifery students’ views of profession-related peer mentoring, qualitative and quantitative data were collected from 21 midwifery students at one Australian university. Analysis of the data revealed that most participants felt they would benefit from and would like to know more about mentoring. The qualitative themes, ‘Support’ and ‘Knowledge and Guidance’, convey the challenges to being mentored in the clinical area as well as participants’ ‘ideal mentor’ profile. Further work to conceptualise and test a robust clinical mentorship matrix for midwifery students is required