The Relationship Between the Mentorship Skills and Professional Attitudes of Preceptor Nurses: A Multi-Centre Study

Objective: The research was conducted to determine to evaluate the mentoring skills of the preceptor nurses, their professional attitudes and the relationship between mentorship skills and professional attitudes. Method: The study was conducted with all preceptor nurses who guided newly hired nurses (n: 245) that were employed at two university hospitals, two research, and training hospitals, and two private hospitals under the Turkish Ministry of Health. The data were collected between 1 August and 30 October 2017. The research was conducted with a descriptive and relationship-seeking design. The data were collected by using Nurse Information Form, the Mentorship Scale, and the Vocational Professional Attitude Inventory. Frequencies, percentages, means, standard deviations, ANOVA, t -test, Kruskal Wallis tests were used to analyze the data, while Cronbach's alpha coefficient and Pearson analyses were used for reliability analysis. Results: This research determined that 80.8% stated that they voluntarily worked as preceptor nurses, 58.8% said they attended training programs on the preceptor, and 84.1% expressed their relationship with the nurse they supervised as a teacher-student relationship. The participants had high mentorship skills (4.27 +/- 0.43) and high vocational professional attitudes (147.42 +/- 9.56). As the mentorship skills of the participants increased, it was observed that their vocational professional attitudes also significantly increased (p<.001). Conclusion: The preceptor nurses who participated in this study had high levels of mentorship skills. The participants also had high levels of vocational professional attitudes. As the mentorship skills of the participants increased, their vocational professional attitudes also increased significantly.