Mentoring: nurturing the critical care nurse.

Mentoring is an active process that is currently receiving widespread attention in education, in the corporate world, and increasingly in health care. Job satisfaction of the critical care nurse may be related to the fulfillment of personal needs and goals. The attainment of these needs and goals ultimately will lead to increased job productivity, which in turn will promote cost-effectiveness, an outcome cherished by management. Therefore, recognizing the worth of job satisfaction to the institution and the possibility that mentoring may have an effect on it among the professional staff may be a key to the future of improved health care and cost reduction in an increasingly specialized and technologic health care environment. Certainly, the nursing shortage is no longer news to the lay public or those of us engaged in the practice of nursing. In critical care that shortage is acutely apparent. Attrition of qualified critical care nurses is increasing and various solutions to the shortage have been proposed, some being met with more enthusiasm than others. A more basic solution might be to answer the question, "How can we maintain a high quality of patient care while promoting job satisfaction and instilling a sense of self-worth within the critical care nurse?" Critical care nurses need to play a pivotal role in nurturing and developing other critical care nurses as a means to retain those individuals. How can they do that effectively? Mentoring is one answer.