Survey Evaluating Elements in Choosing Mentors/ Mentees in Anesthesia

Mentorship is increasingly recognised as a core component of career advancement, medical education and psychosocial support.

Mentorship is defined as the relationship between a mentor and a mentee, where both collegially gain from an open and active relationship.

A mentor can be seen as a role model, a supervisor, an advisor, and a career coach.

A mentee is counselled, trained, or advised by a mentor and can be assimilated to a protégé.

A mentee has the potential to gain multiple advantages from their mentorship such as protection, sponsorship, exposure, promotion and transmission of professional ethics.

Moreover, psychosocial support in the form of identity fostering, sense of competence and role effectiveness might protect the mentee from burdens such as burnout. As a mentee's needs often change over the course of their career, it is therefore possible to have multiple mentors at different stages.

When engaging in an mentoring relationship, free choice has been shown to be more effective than automatic assignment. Unfortunately, free choice can enhance inequities in mentorship as various groups lack representation, social connections and experience a lack of opportunities to find the right mentor. Gender inequities in finding mentorship have been reported and may affect job satisfaction and career advancement.

When establishing mentorship, it is important to foster trust. Even though free choice has been reported as essential, some mentoring programs (endorsed by societies such as ESAIC / ASA) have been successfully implemented within anaesthesia(6). Sub-societies, such as ASRA, have established well-defined mentor/mentee programs (ASRA Pain Medicine Mentor Match program) where mentor/ mentee match is based on common interests.

However, there is overall little known about mentorship in anaesthesia.

A survey of mentorship in Canadian anaesthesiology residents reported multiple barriers to successful mentorship: time constraint, personal or professional incompatibility (in mentorship programs) and lack of resident choice in mentor selection(3).

A qualitative study of perceptions of mentorship by both faculty and residents identified the following:

• Evolution of the mentor-mentee relationship during residency from a primary focus on psychosocial aspect to a need of career facilitation in the end.
• Importance of congruence/ representation of gender, culture and ethnicity.

An anaesthesia specific survey has already investigated the practices of mentorship and career development during residency in the USA from the point of view of program directors.

To our knowledge, no study has yet explored the fostering of an anaesthetic mentor-mentee relationship from the point of view of the mentor and mentee themselves. Preferences with regards to implementation programs versus free choice and the importance of sociodemographic characteristics (gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, age) have also yet to be investigated.

The prevalence of mentor-mentee relationships/ the understanding of mentor and mentee choice in anaesthesia will be studied.

In parallel, key socio-demographics that are linked to the choice of mentor-mentee, as well as evaluate availability of mentors, and other barriers to finding mentorship will also be investigated.

Hypothesis: mentorship might be affected by demographics such as gender, age, ethnicity, working country, experience, academia and subspecialty.