Case 1

You are recruited as a clinician educator in the division of geriatrics. You have done
your training in this university but you need to find a mentor who will help you navigate
your early academic endeavours.

How should you identify a mentor? How should you prepare for your meetings with
a mentor? What should you discuss at your initial meeting with a potential mentor?

Potential Issues to Address:

1. What are the potential mentor’s expectations for the relationship (objectives,
   time devoted to it, how you’d meet, what opportunities they’ll provide, etc.)
   and how well do they match yours?
2. Will they work with you to design your individual development plan and
   contract with you to set goals and monitor progress?
3. What is their approach to intellectual property (authorship and
   investigatorship) around any research projects/manuscripts/patents that might
   develop? How can you broach these subjects with your prospective mentor?
4. Is the mentor agreeable to discussing all aspects of your career, including
   administration, clinical, educational, research and work/life balance issues? If
   not, do they have suggestions on potential additional members for a
   mentorship team who could address the gaps?
5. Given that the vice chair is providing resources to you, how do you ensure
   that you have the freedom to use these resources as you believe is appropriate
   to advance your research?
6. Can you speak to this person’s other/previous mentees?
7. How is the ‘chemistry’ between the 2 of you? – Is there potential for
   meaningful interaction?

Case 2

You are a senior clinical researcher in the Department of Medicine with an interest in
models of care to reduce delirium on inpatient surgical patients. A former resident, Dr.
Smith, had worked with you on the inpatient service, was both an excellent clinician and
a very collegial person. It was this interaction that piqued Dr. Smith’s interest in
completing training in clinical research methodology. You were happy to grant his
request that you become his mentor in the MSc program in clinical epidemiology,
although you didn’t formalize any specific plans for how this would be carried out. At his
initial thesis meeting, you discussed his proposed research into quality indicators in
hospitalized older patients with fractured hips. And, as part of the thesis process, Dr.
Smith subsequently wrote a summary of the proposal and sent it to you to review.
Because you concluded that his proposal not only lacked focus, but was too ambitious for
a Masters thesis, you provided detailed feedback and urged him to refine his research
question and come back with a more workable thesis plan. However, when you met
again 1 month later, there was no evidence that he’d made any progress with the project,
and he appeared overwhelmed by his clinical and course requirements.

What should you do?

Potential Issues to Address:

1. At the start, determine if there are any emotional health issues that are
   affecting the mentee and arrange care as necessary. But if it’s a matter of a
   healthy person feeling overwhelmed because of competing demands on his
   over-committed time, focus on time management and organization.
2. Did you establish a detailed mentorship contract at the outset? The pros and
   cons of doing that at this point in time?
3. Can you establish regular meetings and set achievable goals for each of them?
4. Are there resources (that you could arrange) that would help your mentee
   meet his (and your) goals?

What steps may have been taken at the beginning of the research mentorship
relationship to attempt to avoid this?

Potential Issues to Address:

1. Establishing and agreeing on expectations for mentor and mentee.
2. Establishing an individual development plan/contract.Scheduling regular meetings with goals.
3. Scheduling regular meetings with goals.

Case 3

It has been 1 year since you began your position as an assistant professor at a medium
sized department of medicine. When you were hired, the Chair of Medicine suggested
that the Vice Chair be your career and research mentor because he had similar research
interests to you. The Vice Chair committed $30000 to you as part of your start up
package to facilitate your research program.

You initially met with the Vice Chair and created a development plan for the first year of
your staff position including research, clinical and administrative goals. As part of this
plan, you set goals of applying for a career award and an operating grant. The Vice Chair
agreed to provide advice and feedback on your applications and to be named as a mentor
on the career award. You provided an outline of your original idea for your operating
grant, and discussed it with him in a subsequent meeting.

Since that meeting, you have been unable to arrange a time to meet with the Vice Chair
because he was “too busy with his own research and administrative duties.” You sent a
draft of your career award application to him but you didn’t receive any feedback, despite
trying to meet on several occasions and sending the grant to him several times via email
and snail mail.

One day when you were drafting your operating grant, you received an email from the
Vice Chair’s administrative assistant requesting that you send her your CV for inclusion
in a different operating grant that was being submitted tomorrow with the Vice Chair as
PI. The assistant said the Vice Chair wanted to invite you to be a co-investigator on the
grant. But upon reading his grant proposal, you find that its central idea was the one you
had developed on your own and had brought to the Vice Chair for with the objective of
making it the focus of your own operating grant application.

What should you do?

Potential issues to address:

1. Intellectual property, including grants/publications/patents should be discussed
   upfront by mentor and mentee.
2. Could meet with the vice chair alone to express concerns.
3. Could meet with the chair and vice chair if you don’t feel comfortable meeting
   with vice chair alone to discuss this issue – especially given the vice chair has
   provided you some research $$. Or could seek out some senior/emeritus member
   of the department who “has no dog in this fight.”
4. Follow-up with written document summarizing the issues discussed – this could
   be done after each mentor/mentee meeting so that expectations/goals are clear for
   both the mentor and mentee.
5. Find another mentor!

Case 4

Following review of your annual activity report, you mention to your Department
Chair/Dean that you and some of your colleagues have been discussing the lack of a
formal mentorship initiative in your department. Your Chair/Dean says that she agrees
and asks you to lead a working group to establish a mentorship initiative for the
department. Currently there is no formal mentorship strategy in place. Your department
includes 500 members including researchers, clinicians, educators and administrators.

How would you get started? How would you evaluate the impact of such a
program?

Case 5

You are a mid-career clinician teacher and have been feeling ‘stale’ lately. You still
enjoy your time on the inpatient clinical service with the trainees but you don’t find it as
stimulating as you used to. On the clinical service, you haunt the wards day and night,
tirelessly caring for your patients, always available for family conferences, and
constantly teaching your house staff and students how to gain expertise
in both clinical procedures and critical appraisals (and rescuing and
rehabilitating them when their performance falters). Your division perceives you as the
‘go to’ person to get things done, whether providing assistance on research projects,
filling in on teaching rounds or leading new administrative initiatives.

What should you do?