The deeper value of mentorship

In this month’s Clinical Insight, we are delighted to feature the second of our guest publications, entitled The deeper value of mentorship, by Kate Purcell.

Kate Purcell is a well-known clinician, educator and mentor, and we are delighted that she is also a Visiting Fellow at Health Sciences University. It is fantastic to have Kate as part of the Institute of Musculoskeletal Health and Innovation (IMHI), and her expertise will play an important role in the mentorship offer we are developing for clinicians as part of the Institute’s future plans.

In this publication, Kate eloquently explores some of the key principles, considerations and challenges associated with effective clinical mentorship. Mentorship is something that clinicians at every stage of their career may experience, either as a mentor or mentee, yet navigating what constitutes a good mentoring relationship is not always straightforward.

Kate provides valuable insight into the role of the mentor, the expectations of the relationship and some of the challenges that can arise. Her reflections offer useful considerations for anyone involved in supporting the development of colleagues and future clinicians.

We are delighted to share Kate’s contribution and look forward to building on her expertise as we continue to develop our wider clinical mentorship offer through IMHI.

Dr Neil Langridge
Director of Clinical & Rehabilitation Services/IMHI

The deeper value of mentorship

 To learn is to be human. From our earliest experiences, we’re continually making sense of ourselves and the world around us, whether we realise it or not. In healthcare, patients learn as they make sense of symptoms, while clinicians are expected to remain lifelong learners, continually adapting their understanding and practice as knowledge, experience and circumstances change.

Education is often equated with information and advice, with learning assumed to follow. But learning is more than receiving information. It’s an ongoing, active and situated process where information and experiences are interpreted in relation to existing knowledge, beliefs, emotions and social and environmental contexts (Biggs & Tang, 2011; Illeris, 2018). Embodied-enactive theories challenge the traditional separation of body and mind: learning isn’t something the mind does independently of the body, but emerges through lived experience and interactions with the world (Øberg et al., 2015).

Education and learning are therefore not synonymous, and learning can’t simply be transmitted. It can, however, be deliberately supported by creating conditions and opportunities for people to make meaning and transfer what they learn to new situations (Cecilio-Fernandes et al., 2025).

This creates a challenge for musculoskeletal healthcare. We increasingly expect clinicians to help patients become confident and adaptable self-managers, which is as much a learning need as a clinical one. Yet physiotherapy has tended to focus more on interventions and clinical outcomes than on how people learn and develop understanding, judgement and capability, while many of us have trained and continue to work in systems that prioritise information, compliance and episodic, competency-focused training. We may therefore be asking clinicians to facilitate something that has remained largely implicit in their own development and practice.

Beyond supervision

Mentorship in healthcare can take many forms, from discussing difficult cases and developing clinical skills to broader professional development. In an emotionally demanding profession, the relationship can also be a place to think aloud, share difficult experiences and regain perspective, echoing the restorative dimension of clinical supervision (Proctor, 1986). These are valuable functions, but through my own experiences as both mentor and mentee, and across higher education and advanced practice, I’ve come to recognise another, perhaps less obvious, connection. Skilled mentorship can make the mechanisms of learning more visible, shaping how we understand it, how we support it in others, and how we can apply it more deliberately in clinical practice.

In early careers, mentorship can support the development of knowledge, confidence, clinical reasoning and autonomy. With experience, its value changes. Greater pattern recognition and efficiency can also make biases, assumptions and habitual ways of thinking harder to see. Reflection is therefore vital for expertise, but it has limits when confined to our own frame of reference.

Mentorship makes reflection relational. Dialogue, feedback, curious questioning and another perspective can expose blind spots and make reasoning visible (Mylopoulos et al., 2018; Ng et al., 2022). It can also create space to sit with uncertainty, allowing it to become a catalyst for curiosity and learning (Mezirow, 1991).

Skilled mentorship therefore requires more than clinical experience. It requires an understanding of learning and judgement about when to challenge, guide, support or leave space for people to interpret and make sense of their experiences, rather than just providing answers – an approach consistent with constructivist theories of learning (Biggs, 1996). Effective mentorship also depends on a trusting relationship that provides enough psychological safety to express uncertainty and risk being wrong without humiliation, alongside enough challenge to question and revise one’s thinking (Edmondson, 1999). Leahy et al. (2026) describe this balance as ‘comfort disruption’. Understanding the psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness that underpin motivation can further inform how we support ongoing learning and development (Ryan & Deci, 2020).

From mentorship to clinical practice

These conditions aren’t unique to mentorship. Education and support for self-management are professional requirements of physiotherapists (World Physiotherapy 2023), and both depend on learning. If people are to interpret symptoms, make decisions and adapt when professional support is no longer immediately available, physiotherapy’s role needs to extend beyond providing information and restoring function to supporting learning that transfers beyond the clinical encounter.

In physiotherapy, much of the learning that occurs can be understood as experiential and embodied: people learn through what they experience, sense and discover as they move and exercise – testing expectations, interpreting symptoms and discovering changes in what their bodies can do (Kolb, 1984; Øberg et al., 2015). When we understand mind and body as inseparable, it’s perhaps no coincidence that familiar principles of rehabilitation – support and progressive challenge, feedback and repetition, variation, meaningful and functional activities, and increasing autonomy – are also principles of learning.

Learning, then, isn’t something that happens alongside physiotherapy – it’s part of the architecture underneath it. However, experiences don’t have predetermined meanings. The same advice, exercise or intervention can reinforce fear, enhance confidence, unsettle a belief or open new possibilities, depending on a person’s prior knowledge, experiences, beliefs, and context. This shifts attention beyond what we say or do towards the meaning a person constructs from encounters. This can’t be assumed; it needs to be explored.

Here, mentorship and clinical practice share a key educational principle. A mentor can calibrate support and challenge, creating opportunities for mentees to reflect rather than simply correcting their reasoning. A clinician can similarly explore a patient’s understanding and experience and, through the deliberate application of learning principles, help them make sense of and apply what they learn in everyday life, rather than focusing solely on exercise prescription or direction.

This may be particularly relevant to first-contact roles, where brief encounters and limited opportunities for follow-up can encourage a default to didactic approaches and information provision. These approaches might be helpful for some people, but limited time makes understanding how to facilitate learning effectively more, not less, important.

Mentorship as experiential learning

This is where mentorship offers something particularly valuable: it allows us to experience the facilitation of learning from the learner’s side. We also learn from what a mentor models: how they communicate, respond when we’re uncertain, make mistakes or see things differently. These experiences can then shape how we work with patients, colleagues and other learners. Repeated across a profession, mentorship can influence not only individual practitioners, but our collective idea of what good practice and professional development look like.

Learning, however, isn’t always comfortable. The emotional dimension becomes particularly visible when new experiences, feedback and perspectives challenge existing beliefs, established ways of practising and our sense of competence. Emotion is also integral to healthcare practice, shaping how we think, reason, make decisions, behave and relate to others (Ajjawi et al., 2022; Kozlowski et al., 2017). Longitudinal mentorship can provide a relational space to notice, articulate and reflect on emotional responses, supporting the development of emotional competence as an important capability in complex practice (Ramani et al., 2024; Joly et al., 2026).

The deepest learning mentorship supports may therefore be dispositional rather than informational – mentorship may shape not only what we know or do, but how we think and feel. Over time, curiosity, reflection, openness and epistemic humility can become more than things we consciously practise; they can become habitual ways of being.

In an increasingly polarised world, where complex issues are often reduced to binary positions, where certainty trumps nuance, and where AI-generated information is increasingly embedded in how we learn and make decisions, the capacity to remain curious and critical, engage with different perspectives, revise our conclusions and help others interpret and meaningfully apply information has value well beyond clinical practice.

Clinical realities, however, often pull in the opposite direction. Time pressures and service models favour answers over exploration, direction over autonomy, solving today’s problem over building capability for the next one. These pressures affect clinicians as learners too. Reflection, curiosity and tolerance of uncertainty are hard to sustain in systems that reward efficiency, certainty and throughput.

If mentorship cultivates these dispositions, its value extends beyond “nice to have” CPD to how we understand and deliver healthcare itself (Lin et al., 2026). Systems that prioritise mentorship are, in effect, designing conditions for a different kind of practice: one that recognises learning and developing capability as fundamental to musculoskeletal care, rather than something that happens alongside it.

Perhaps this is the deeper value of mentorship. It doesn’t simply help us know more or practise better. It can shape the kind of people, practitioners, and profession we become.

References

Ajjawi, R., Olson, R.E. and McNaughton, N., 2022. Emotion as reflexive practice: A new discourse for feedback practice and research. Medical Education, 56(5), pp.480-488.

Biggs, J. (1996). Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment. Higher Education, 32(3), 347–364.

Cecilio‑Fernandes D, Sandars J, Gianotto‑Oliveira R, Steenhof N. Teaching for transfer of learning in health professions education: AMEE Guide No. 176. Med Teach. 2025;47(8):1243–1251. doi: 10.1080/0142159X.2024.2414823.

Edmondson, A. C. (1999) ‘Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), pp. 350–383. doi: 10.2307/2666999.empathyvssympathy

Illeris, K. (ed.) (2018) Contemporary theories of learning: Learning theorists … in their own words. 2nd edn. Abingdon: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781315147277.taylorfrancis

Joly, L., Nunes de Sousa, A., Bardiau, M., Dory, V., Bayot, M. and Lenoir, A.L., 2026. Impact of emotional competence on clinical reasoning: a scoping review. BMJ open, 16(6), p.e113483.

Kolb, D. A. (1984) Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Kozlowski, D., Hutchinson, M., Hurley, J. and Browne, G. (2017) ‘The role of emotion in clinical decision making: an integrative literature review’, BMC Medical Education, 17, 255. doi: 10.1186/s12909-017-1089-7.

Leahy, E., Chipchase, L. and Blackstock, F.C., 2026. A clinical mentoring framework for health professionals. Advances in Health Sciences Education, 31(3), pp.1003-1021.

Lin, S., Pascoe, L., Ward, G., Sinclair, L., Payk, M., Zheng, A., Sibbritt, D. and Peng, W., 2026. Designing Mentorship for Constrained Systems: Reframing Workforce Development in Rural and Remote Health. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 23(5), p.676.

Mezirow, J. (1991) Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Mylopoulos, M., Kulasegaram, K. and Woods, N. N. (2018) ‘Developing the experts we need: Fostering adaptive expertise through education’, Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 24(3), pp. 674–677. doi: 10.1111/jep.12905.

Ng, S. L., Forsey, J., Boyd, V. A., Friesen, F., Langlois, S., Ladonna, K., Mylopoulos, M. and Steenhof, N. (2022) ‘Combining adaptive expertise and (critically) reflective practice to support the development of knowledge, skill, and society’, Advances in Health Sciences Education, 27(5), pp. 1265–1281. doi: 10.1007/s10459-022-10178-8.pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih

Øberg, G.K., Normann, B. and Gallagher, S., 2015. Embodied-enactive clinical reasoning in physical therapy. Physiotherapy theory and practice, 31(4), pp.244-252.

Ramani S, Kusurkar RA, Lyon‑Maris J, Pyörälä E, Rogers GD, Samarasekera DD, Taylor DCM, ten Cate O. Mentorship in health professions education – an AMEE guide for mentors and mentees: AMEE Guide No. 167. Med Teach. 2024;46(8):999–1011. doi: 10.1080/0142159X.2023.2273217.

Ryan, R. M. and Deci, E. L. (2020) Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation from a self-determination theory perspective: Definitions, theory, practices, and future directions, Contemporary Educational Psychology, 61, 101860. doi: 10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101860.

World Physiotherapy (2023) Policy statement: Description of physiotherapy. London: World Physiotherapy. Available at: https://world.physio/policy/ps-descriptionPT