Planning a sustainable neurosurgery mentorship program in a war-torn country: experience from Iraq

The importance of mentorships in medical education and neurosurgery is highly attributed to the support and encouragement of the advances and learning opportunities for medical students and junior neurosurgeons. Planning a mentorship program according to the target audience offers to satisfy different interests and enhance education. One of the main issues with most of the already implemented programs is the sustainability and inability to maintain continuous cycles of mentorship, which have a negative impact and have led to an interrupted pattern of learning which eventually leads to a decline in the engagement of participants and loss of interest. This problem is most pronounced in war-torn countries, with Iraq as an example, where external circumstances lead to an arrest in the educational process and a depletion of the resources useful for such programs and training courses. This paper aims to address the main pathways essential in planning a sustainable mentorship program in a war-torn country by highlighting our experience in maintaining an ongoing mentorship with nine consecutive courses over the last 6 years in Iraq.