Mentoring the Students for Competency-Based Medical Education: What, Why, and How?

Mentoring is a process whereby the mentor guides the mentee in a way that empowers the mentee to achieve his full potential. Although traditionally mentoring was one-on-one, in the current times there are several other ways to mentor, including group, online, peer, near-peer, and speed mentoring. Mentoring is a vital component of competency-based medical education, with benefits for the mentees, the mentors, the institute, and the society at large. The National Medical Commission has made it mandatory for all the medical colleges to have a structured mentorship program. In this article, we clarify what is and what is not mentoring and outline a step-wise approach for creating and sustaining a mentorship program. We describe the three phases of initiation, cultivation, and separation/redefinition that the mentor-mentee groups go through. We also highlight the usefulness of forming learning contracts between mentor and mentee and the importance of program evaluation and feedback from all the stakeholders at regular intervals in a systematic manner. We conclude by delineating the challenges and the ways to overcome them while also describing some lessons to be learnt from the mentoring relationship between Krishna and Arjun as depicted in the story of Mahabharata.