Job crafting strategies of nurse mentors as mentors and nurses and their impact on missed nursing care: A cross-sectional study

Background: Nurse mentors face challenging circumstances because of their dual role as nurses and mentors. As nurses, they are expected to provide high-quality care for patients and as mentors, they are concomitantly engaged with developing the next generation of nurses.Objectives: To examine the relationship between job crafting strategies and missed nursing care among nurse mentors, in their roles as nurses and mentors.Design: A cross-sectional design.Setting: Various wards and hospitals during 2021. Participants: Eighty nurse mentors responsible for supervising nursing students. Methods: Participants completed on-line survey, including the MISSCARE questionnaire, the Job Crafting Scale, and control variables. SPSS was used to conduct two multivariable linear regressions. Results: As a nurse, higher enhancing structural job resources was significantly associated with lower missed nursing care, while higher enhancing social job resources was significantly associated with higher missed nursing care. As a mentor, higher enhancing structural job resources was significantly associated with lower missed care, while higher enhancing challenging job demands was significantly associated with higher missed care. Conclusion: The results indicate that not all job crafting strategies are effective in maintaining high-quality care among nurse mentors. In their dual role as nurses and mentors, nurse mentors often face a Catch-22 situation, namely, meeting expectations of both students and patients. Thus, they increase their job resources and challenging demands; however, not all strategies improve the quality of care. Nursing policymakers and managers should provide tailored interventions that enhance the structural job resources of nurse mentors and avoid the use of challenging job demands and social job resource strategies when mentoring nursing students.

Automated summary

This study investigated the relationship between job crafting strategies and missed nursing care among nurse mentors in their dual role as nurses and mentors. The results indicate that not all job crafting strategies are effective in maintaining high-quality care among nurse mentors. Therefore, nursing policymakers and managers should provide tailored interventions that enhance the structural job resources of nurse mentors and avoid the use of challenging job demands and social job resource strategies when mentoring nursing students.