On the 1st April 2016 Health Education England Thames Valley appointed a Fellow for one year. The Fellow is a registered nurse and Senior Lecturer in mentorship and professional education at Oxford Brookes University. This post was developed due to the challenge of the numbers of adult nursing placements required in terms of placement capacity and the added pressure on nurse mentors who supervise and assess the students (DH 2016 Willis 2015)). Increasing capacity and improving the quality of the learning environment in both the NHS and the non-NHS sector are key HEE drivers and essential components of this role (NHS England 2014). There is one overarching model which predominates within the field of student nurse mentorship in the UK; that is a one to one model (RCN 2015 Kerfoot and Cox 2005). This is whereby one student is allocated to one named mentor for the duration of their placement (RCN 2015). New models of mentorship have emerged in recent years and the challenge to the Fellow was to encourage NHS Trusts to pilot different models (Hill et al 2015).
