Mentors were provided with training in mentorship to ensure they had knowledge of and exhibited the most engaging mentor characteristics.
We designed a questionnaire to assess key characteristics of mentoring programs, participating mentors, mentees and their relationships (See Appendices 1 & 2 for instructions to participants and the survey questionnaire).
The review has therefore gone some way to linking the characteristics of mentoring as a strategy for addressing the social determinants of health through social inclusion, engagement and empowerment and provides a significant contribution to the public health literature.
The intended characteristics of mentoring relationships within the programs were described as personal (5 programs, 23%, see Table 1), early in the career of mentees (4 programs, 18%), on a regular basis (2 programs, 9%) and long-lasting (1 program, 5%).
These were then conceptually mined for their characteristics to develop a model of mentoring that included the initiating environments, facilitating environments, operational strategies and outcomes.
This addresses an identified need to describe mentoring programs in terms of the nature of mentoring relationships, not just the availability of programs, paying attention to the characteristics of both the mentors and mentees (Crisp and Cruz 2009; Gershenfeld 2014; Jacobi 1991).
This systematic review reports on the state of evidence on mentoring for Indigenous Australians by identifying the quantity, nature, quality and characteristics of mentoring publications.
Table 3 displays the key characteristics of the fifteen resultant publications; while Figure 4 provides a succinct summary of the characteristics in terms of initiating environments, facilitating environments, strategies and outcomes of mentoring.> The fifteen eligible publications focussed on Indigenous Australian mentoring implemented in various places across Australia.
The Japanese survey consisted of 35 items covering: demographic characteristics, department and area of research (basic medicine, clinical medicine, social medicine or other); mentorship characteristics, including mentor assignment, position of mentor, department of mentor and mentoring frequency; the mentee's perceptions of mentoring, including satisfaction with mentoring.
