Establishing mentoring in European collaboration

Although mentoring in nursing science has a long tradition in countries, like the United States, where mentoring is recognized as an essential tool in academia aiming to mentor the new generation of nurse scientists, this is not the case in most European countries. Despite the fact that postdoctoral nurses are important for the development of nursing both as a profession and as science, they, however, do face a wide range of challenges and barriers in their work. Therefore, to improve the situation, a European collaboration of postdoctoral nurses established the online mentoring and leadership educational program for doctoral nursing students and postdoctoral nurses (Nurse-Lead). The goal of the Nurse-Lead program was to provide opportunities for doctoral nursing students and postdoctoral nurses to expand leadership professional development and research competencies and to support them into an academic career in nursing and to establish new transnational networks of nurse scientists. In this chapter, the authors report on their work in the Nurse-Lead program and describe how the doctoral nursing students and postdoctoral nurses participating in the Nurse-Lead program, together with their mentors developed mentoring relationships with the focus on leadership and professional development of the mentee.