entorship is a term frequently used by academic medicine leaders. Ironically, in many instances, the term appears to be optimistically overused and practically underutilized. Mentorship is a great concept but sadly is lacking in day-to-day academic practice. Why? Effective mentorship is hard work and built only on trust and personal relationships between mentors and mentees. These relationships rarely develop unless there is a culture within departments that encourages mentorship and development of academic careers. In today’s time-pressured academic practices, mentoring efforts can be more theoretical than practical and effective.

Strong Bonds Needed
The first step in developing an effective mentorship program is to ensure that those who serve as mentors are enthusiastic and accomplished in their own academic careers. There is, however, more to it — there must be a strong respect, at times even affection, between mentors and mentees. It’s often difficult to predict which personnel matches will result in strong mentoring relationships. It takes part wisdom and part good fortune in projecting and nuturing these matches. Our experience suggests that cookbook approaches to mentoring academic careers that result in young physicians being randomly or dubiously assigned to more senior physicians, approaches that appear to be used frequently in some academic anesthesiology departments, are likely to fail. Worse yet is the lack of any attempt to mentor trainees and young faculty members into academic careers.

Once a decision is made to actively engage a mentoring process, one of the most important keys to success is to ensure that there are multiple opportunities for potential mentors and mentees to interact. These should occur in a wide variety of academic settings, both formal and informal. For example, journal clubs held in faculty members’ homes offer opportunities for personal interactions. Similarly, extensive faculty involvement in didactic conferences and in challenging clinical care allow personal relationships and mutual respect of professional skills and talents to develop.

Departments must encourage and develop cultures in which mentorship and interest in academic anesthesiology is nurtured. Chairs and senior faculty must truly value this activity and demonstrate their commitment to colleagues and trainees by their regular attendance and participation in departmental clinical, educational and research activities. The establishment of an atmosphere of excitement for discovery through clinical and laboratory research and also performance improvement activities within departments is essential. It is far too easy for leaders and faculty to focus on the day-to-day difficulties and negatives found in many academic anesthesiology departments rather than promote efforts that can be used to develop interest in academic anesthesiology in young faculty and trainees. As department leaders, it is our responsibility to encourage mentorship and build optimism for the future of our specialty in our faculty and trainees.

Mentoring Panel Scheduled
Effective patterns of mentoring will be featured in next year’s Association of University Anesthesiologists (AUA) President’s Panel during our Annual Meeting on May 11-13 in Tucson, Arizona. This panel will provide AUA members with ideas for successful mentoring of academic faculty. David L. Brown, M.D., will provide a brief overview of academic faculty mentoring, which will be made possible through a survey of our academic programs directed at uncovering mentoring strategies and department demographics. Ronald D. Miller, M.D., will go on to describe the “Academy of Mentors” at the University of California-San Francisco and how it impacts mentoring throughout the institution and department. D. David Glass, M.D., will cover Dartmouth University’s approach to mentoring, including the exciting work of combined residency and research training that is approved by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education for Dartmouth. Jeffrey S. Balser, M.D., will cover his experience with research mentoring both in department and institutional roles. John P. Kampine, M.D., Ph.D., will outline what the Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research has instituted and is planning for mentoring within the specialty.

David L. Brown, M.D., is Edward Rotan Distinguished Professor and Chairman, Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas.

Mark A. Warner, M.D., is Professor and Chair, Department of Anesthesiology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota.