Does Mentoring Matter in Medical Students’ Choice of Career in Anaesthesia? An Exploratory Study on Career Choice and Factors Limiting Mentoring Opportunities in Two Nigerian Medical Schools

To evaluate medical students in two south-western Nigerian medical schools on the impact of teacher-student mentoring on their choice of career in Anaesthesia and also explore the reasons why they had not benefited from mentorship by the anaesthetist.

This research was a cross-sectional study conducted among medical students at the University of Ibadan and the Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU), Nigeria. Study tool was a self-administered anonymous questionnaire. Information on participant's status on benefiting from mentorship in Anaesthesia was obtained. They were also requested to provide the reasons why they were not able to get such mentorship opportunities. Data collected from 202 medical students were analysed using the SPSS version 16 software.

The mean (±SD) age of the 202 respondents was 25.2 (±2.5) years, 94.6% were single, 75.2% were 600 level (final year) students, whereas 48.0% were students from the OOU. Only 26 (12.9%) respondents had anaesthetists as mentors, 174 (86.1%) did not, whereas 2 (1.0%) did not indicate their mentorship status. A higher proportion of the students who had an anaesthetist as a mentor desired to specialise in Anaesthesia [10/26(38.5%) versus 21/174 (12.1%)], when compared with those with no mentor in Anaesthesia. Lack of personal interest in Anaesthesia was the major reason why many of the respondents had no mentor in Anaesthesia.

Mentorship was found to increase medical students’ likelihood of choosing a career in Anaesthesia by 26.4%. Many of the surveyed medical students did not like to specialise in anaesthesia. However, mentorship programmes can still be judiciously utilised to develop their interest in this specialty.