Mentors' competence in mentoring nursing students in clinical practice: Detecting profiles to enhance mentoring practices

Aims: To describe the mentoring competence of clinical practice nurse mentors and identify different mentor profiles. Design: Cross-sectional research design, secondary analysis. Methods: An international, cross-sectional study design was performed in five European countries. A total of 1 604 mentors from 33 healthcare organizations participated in the study between 2016–2019. The Mentors' Competence Instrument (MCI), which includes seven sub-dimensions and 44 items, was used to collect data. K-means cluster and binary regression analyses were performed to detect mentor profiles and determine how various factors affect competence, respectively. Results: The K-means cluster analysis identified three distinct profiles: A (n = 926); B (n = 566); and C (n = 85). The profiles showed significantly different values (p <.001) across all seven areas of mentoring competence. In comparison with the other profiles, nurses in profile A were older, had more work experience and were more probably to have completed mentoring-specific training.