Mentoring in specialist workforce development: a realist evaluation

This study is a realist evaluation of developmental mentoring. It aims to contribute to the accumulation of knowledge about how mentoring works as an intervention and an approach. It is based on a project-in-practice: a Mentoring Programme that was offered to a group of non-medical specialist practitioners across all health and care sectors. Their specialism involved working with people living with long term neurological conditions. As a strategic innovation in workforce development, it was set up to address gaps in services and training opportunities. It ran in the north east of England from 2009-11. The research uses realist methodologies to understand ‘what works, how, for whom, in what circumstances and to what extent’ (Pawson and Tilley, 2004, p.2). It therefore focuses on causality and the way intervention outcomes evolve through people’s responses to resources and opportunities, contextually influenced. Having established the scope and framing of the research, and with the benefit of expert opinion, this study reviews relevant substantive theory and developmental mentoring literature to build a theory-primed and literature-populated framework to evaluate participant data. The analysis leads to the generation of a developmental mentoring model; an inverted hierarchy model for complex interventions, informed by developmental mentoring in a Mentoring Programme; an overarching programme theory that addresses ‘diversity and opportunity’, with subsidiary programme theories for learning and working differently and making a difference; and an evaluation framework for developmental mentoring in a Mentoring Programme. This study contributes to the accumulation of knowledge about developmental mentoring’s core concepts and theory in this field, using realist methodologies that are suited to the complexity of the topic.