Development of mentorship module and its feasibility for community midwives in Sindh, Pakistan: A pilot study

Numerous articles describe the concept of mentorship for providing professional support in midwifery settings in different countries; however, in Pakistan the concept is under developed. Before implementing the concept in the Pakistani context, it was important to first develop a mentorship module and pilot test the idea. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to develop and test a mentorship module to determine its feasibility for educating community midwives about providing mentoring, so that a formal mentorship program could be established in the future. The training aimed to provide skill focused mentorship training to experienced midwives, so that they could perform the role of mentors for newly graduate midwives, in order to support them and build their confidence. The mentorship module was developed with the help of literature review and experts’ suggestion. A structured questionnaire was given to 50 community midwives after they had been provided mentorship training. Community midwives from nineteen districts of Sindh, Pakistan, were surveyed through purposive sampling. All the community midwives agreed that there was a need for mentorship, that the training module was useful, and that they would be able to integrate it into their practice. Over 80% community midwives rated the content of the module as useful, the majority agreed that the total duration of the training (two days) and the length of each session in the training were appropriate. Similarly, all participants reported that the mentoring strategies were helpful. Hence, the mentorship training module was strongly perceived to be feasible and useful by the community midwives of Sindh, Pakistan