When Mentorship Helps and When It Harms: A Perspective on Nurse Well-Being

To propose a framework for understanding mentorship as a potential relational and organisational resource for nurse well-being and workforce sustainability.

Perspective informed by a non-systematic synthesis of selected clinical and academic nursing literature.

Relevant literature informed an author-developed argument and conceptual framework. No formal quality appraisal or expert-group consensus process was undertaken.

CINAHL, MEDLINE and ProQuest, supplemented by Google Scholar. Search was conducted in August 2026.

Effective mentorship is associated with professional confidence, emotional support and job satisfaction. Ineffective or harmful mentoring relationships may contribute to distress or disengagement. The proposed framework links organisational conditions and relationship quality with potential well-being and workforce pathways; these pathways require empirical evaluation.

Clinical services should prepare mentors, allocate protected time, support psychologically safe feedback, recognise cultural differences and prior expertise, and provide confidential routes for reassignment or escalation. These recommendations complement broader workforce support and do not establish mentorship as a proven intervention for burnout prevention.

The framework addresses variable mentoring quality and insufficient organisational support. It offers clinical nurses, mentors and nurse leaders a basis for implementing and evaluating accountable mentoring arrangements.

This is a Perspective, not a systematic review or empirical study; no applicable reporting checklist was used.

This paper develops a conceptual argument from published literature and involved no patients or members of the public.