Transforming Emergency Medicine Mentorship: A Skill-Building Curriculum to Optimize Mentee Growth and Development

Audience and type of curriculum: This mentorship training curriculum is designed for faculty seeking to improve mentoring skills in an academic health system setting. The curriculum offers interactive small-group skill practice supported by brief didactic lectures, paired peer mentoring, and large group reflections. Length of curriculum: The curriculum is designed as three one-hour interactive workshops to be delivered over three to six months to allow for spaced skill practice in between sessions. Introduction/Background: This mentorship training curriculum addresses critical gaps in mentorship quality and availability for emergency medicine faculty and learners. Faculty rarely are trained to be mentors, limiting mentoring quality and accessibility for mentees. We addressed these scarcity and quality gaps by offering concise experiential workshops for mid-career and senior faculty mentors to shift their mentoring mindset from expert advisor to curious and non-judgmental thinking partner, expanding their mentoring skills. Educational Goals: The aim of this curriculum is to train mentors to approach mentoring with a curious and non-judgmental mindset. The curriculum offers specific, practical exercises to increase mentors’ ability to foster a mentee-driven relationship that meets the needs of all mentees, which in turn enhances career development and faculty retention at the department level. Educational Methods: The educational strategies used in this curriculum include brief mentor check-ins, concise didactics with illustrative examples of personal experiences applying the workshop’s mentoring tools, peer mentoring practice time in paired breakout sessions, and large group debriefs. Research Methods: This curriculum was implemented at Oregon Health & Science University in three departments including Emergency Medicine, Ophthalmology, and Hospitalist Division within Internal Medicine. This study was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board at Oregon Health & Science University. We electronically collected survey data after each mentoring session to determine whether the participants found the workshops engaging and effective as well as whether their confidence and mentorship skills improved. The surveys gathered data using a 5-point Likert scale as well as free text responses. Results: Five faculty cohorts from three different departments completed the mentorship curriculum. Of the 35 total participants, 60%, 51%, and 5% completed the post-program feedback surveys for Workshops 1, 2, and 3, respectively. 95% of respondents rated the format as either very engaging or engaging and reported finding the workshop content very useful or moderately useful. All respondents stated they learned new information or skills they could apply to their own work or mentorship. Discussion: An accessible and applicable faculty development mentoring skills curriculum was implemented in three distinct academic departments with favorable assessment by participants. Combining concise lectures, personal mentorship stories, structured mentoring practice sessions, and group reflection effectively advanced faculty members’ skill and confidence in a mentee-centered mentorship approach. We learned that this curriculum is versatile enough to be tailored to various faculty settings and offers an engaging format that motivates faculty to voluntarily participate.