5 Strategies to Create an Engaging, Effective OR Mentorship Program
By: AORN Staff
Published: 3/25/2025
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The benefits of perioperative mentoring are well-established: stronger staff retention, emerging leaders from the front lines, and meaningful improvements in psychological safety that ripple across unit culture, engagement, and efficiency.
But designing a mentorship program that delivers those results—and works for learners at different experience levels—isn’t simple.
“Many administrators expect excellence in preceptorship or mentorship to come naturally with a person’s clinical skills,” says Clinical Nurse Educator Gabrielle Mundie, BSN, RN, CNOR. “However, learning, teaching, and team development skill sets are unique—each skill has its own learning trajectory and learning is not always linear.”
Mundie and her team have spent the last four years puzzling out the challenges of building and sustaining a solid OR mentoring program at Denver Health Medical Center and Hospital in Colorado.
Launched in 2021, the program was shaped with input from the entire OR staff. Gathering frontline feedback was essential—not just for fine-tuning the program’s features, but to build staff buy-in from the beginning.
Still, striking the right balance between engagement, cultural growth, and clinical skill development in such a high-acuity, technically demanding environment hasn’t been easy. “Meeting this need for clinicians at all levels of experience is a labor of love,” Mundie said.
Mundie plans to share her strategies for sustaining a successful OR mentorship program at the AORN annual conference in April. But here are five strategies to start thinking about:
1. Identify What Exists and What’s Needed
Start by evaluating which formal and informal leaders are already mentoring others. Then, identify key stakeholders and cast a wide, inclusive net of perspectives before formalizing your program’s structure and goals.
2. Target the Ideal Outcome
Define what mentorship success looks like from different perspectives. Ask experienced staff, “What do you wish you had when you were new to this clinical setting?” Ask new nurses, “what are your biggest concerns about transitioning from orientation to independence?” Keep asking and keep looking at the system outputs and influences, such as novice confidence, team confidence in novice clinicians, and program feedback. Do the best you can with what you have. Then, when you know better, do better.
3. Structure with Flexibility
Rigid programs don’t grow—and they don’t meet the needs of diverse learners or complex healthcare environments. Instead, build flexibility into your structure. Model mentorship behaviors from the top down, share stories of success, and help learners connect to the big picture when they get stuck in the details. For example, we require learners to set and report out on daily goals, but the goals are highly individualized to a learner’s needs. When goals become repetitive or poorly focused, a mentor steps in to help them refocus on something more challenging, measurable, or meaningful.
4. Incentivize Participation
Mentorship programs only work if people feel safe and motivated to participate. Keep feedback channels simple, accessible, and meaningful. At our facility, we found that psychological safety was key. When trends in feedback highlighted gaps in training, we addressed the gap, acknowledged that the change was a result of front-line feedback, and celebrated the team member with confidential gratitude and recognition.
5. Model the Methods of Meaningful Mentorship
Inspire each generation of professionals to take ownership in mentorship growth and sustainability, just as you would mentor a nurse to take ownership in their own clinical practice growth. This is especially important in listening, observing, and altering mentor pairing and mentor training when needed. Our program has undergone well-informed evolutions on these fronts.
To Mundie, a focus on feedback is essential to a successful OR mentoring program. She stresses that, “teams that fear conflict, retaliation and punitive responses, will not provide meaningful feedback.”
Learn More
Learn more from Gabrielle Mundie and co-presenters Natalie Tybor and Caroline Bartlett on their evolution of an OR mentorship program during their session at AORN Global Surgical Conference & Expo on “Implementing a Mentorship Program in a Hospital-Based Operating Room Department.”
