Louise Duncan Jakubik
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 151
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In the U.S., there is a growing nursing shortage that threatens to cripple the health care system as the need for nursing services, particularly in acute care, continues to outweigh the number of nurses available (Buerhaus, Staiger & Auerbach, 2000). Much attention has been paid to recruitment and retention of hospital staff nurses, who represent the majority of the nursing workforce. Mentoring has been widely suggested as one strategy to promote retention of hospital staff nurses (Allen, 2002a; Allen, 2002b; Fawcett, 2002; Hom, 2003, Oermann & Garvin, 2002; Pinkerton, 2003). Research has demonstrated the relationships between mentoring and both competency and retention among novice staff nurses. Nursing research examining interventions and benefits related to mentoring among nurses beyond the first year in practice is limited (Caine, 1998; Fagan & Fagan, 1983; Thomka, 2004). This research study explored mentoring benefits among pediatric staff nurse proteges through application of a business mentoring model, the Mutual Benefits Model (Zey, 1991), to nursing. This descriptive correlational study used a research booklet containing three questionnaires, demographic questionnaire, Caine Quality of Mentoring Tool (CQM) developed by Caine (1989), and the Jakubik Mentoring Benefits Questionnaire (Jakubik MBQ) developed by this researcher to collect data from 214 pediatric nurses who had experiences as staff nurse proteges in mentoring relationships. The hypothesis that the linear combination of quantity, quality and type of mentoring relationship would predict mentoring benefits better than any one factor alone was rejected. The hypothesis was tested by stepwise multiple regression analysis which revealed an overall R = .55 with quality of mentoring as the only predictor variable which entered the MR equation (p