**1. Introduction**

Mentorship is the bidirectional partnership between a mentor, who acts as a guide or teacher, and a mentee, who acts as a learner. In graduate medical education (GME), mentorship serves to enhance mastery of curriculum content and is important in conveying various non-clinical aspects of training like professionalism, networking, values, clinical judgment, and other soft-skills that are not easily taught in a structured curriculum format [1–3]. This is an often overlooked aspect of personal and professional trainee growth process, as this chapter will outline in granular detail.

Mentorship is important for a variety of reasons, including the ability of participating parties to develop opportunities in education, personal growth, and professional support [4]. Because it is not a strictly defined process, mentorship may appear

somewhat ambiguous to participants. As such, mentorship is not to be confused with advising, coaching or sponsorship [5]. Advising is a system in which one party offers advice and guidance to another party. This is often an administrative task to help ensure the 'advisee' is on track; thus it tends to be a unidirectional exchange [6, 7]. Sponsorship typically involves a well-connected individual advocating for the career advancement of a less established individual. Similar to advising, it is a primarily unidirectional relationship [8]. While mentors may also engage in sponsorship, the two concepts are definitionally distinct while having the potential for synergistic interaction [9, 10].

Mentorship, which is based largely on the difference in experiences between individuals at various stages of their careers, creates a space to "flatten" the vertical hierarchy that governs medical education and offers an opportunity for a more horizontal exchange of information and perspectives. While mentorship is not a new concept or practice in medicine, the analysis of effective mentorship and its role in addressing modern challenges in postgraduate medical education is relatively new, and an area that clearly warrants more investigation [11]. The goal of this chapter is to outline different approaches toward mentorship and provide the reader with basic concepts relevant to effective and competent practice of mentorship.

## **2. An overview of benefits of mentorship**

Mentorship can be used as a tool to improve outcomes, professional transitions, research productivity, recovery from burnout, and can even teach resilience. The role of mentorship in easing the transition from being a medical student to becoming a practicing clinician has been demonstrated in several studies [12–15]. Similar to medical students entering into residency training, nurse practitioners experience a similar transition and 'reality shock' when they move to a full-time hospital position [16, 17]. Of importance, a negative experience during this transition can have significant impact on preventing individuals from reaching their potential and may cause some to even leave the profession. The dichotomy between expectations and reality, along with increased responsibility, can take a toll as individuals navigate their new roles. When mentorship is utilized to ease such transitions, confidence and competence of mentees may increase [18, 19]. It may also be reasonably expected that mentorship-based interventions may produce a number of beneficial effects, including decreased burnout and turnover [18, 20–22].

#### **3. Mentorship and burnout**

Based on the above observations, it follows that mentorship is an emerging tool in combating burnout. In fact, residency training is the stage where physicians are most vulnerable to burnout [23–26]. The annual cost of burnout-related medical errors and workforce turnover is estimated to be \$4.6 billion excluding the emotional cost of these errors to patients, families, and physicians [23, 27, 28]. Burnout is largely due to work demands, personal relationship strain, lack of rest/sleep, and high levels of responsibility [29–31]. Residents who have experienced burnout identified mentorship from colleagues and attendings as an important part of recovering from this insidious condition [23, 32]. Additionally many of the factors related to burnout are ubiquitous to residency and by implementing peer mentorship from more advanced residents, programs have been able to normalize the intern experience and minimize difficulties, while promoting resilience and wellness in these vulnerable groups [33, 34].
