Styles of Mentoring
Zachary Wallace, MD, MSc, assistant professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, and member, Clinical Epidemiology Research Program, Division of Rheumatology, Allergy, and Immunology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, spoke next, and he focused on several different types of mentors that exist, as presented in an excellent paper published in JAMA Internal Medicine.2
The traditional mentor is one who uses a formal, dynamic and reciprocal relationship with a novice (mentee) to promote career growth for both the mentor and mentee.
The coach is an individual who teaches others how to improve in a particular skill or subject; coaches are distinct from mentors in that they focus on performance related to a specific issue rather than growth in multiple dimensions.
A sponsor is someone who does several things: uses his/her influence in a field to make mentees more visible; risks his/her reputation when recommending junior colleagues; and promotes a mentee without this action being visible to the mentee, meaning that support is given in a somewhat anonymous fashion.
Connectors, the final category, represent master networkers who have extensive social and political capital accrued from years of academic success. By making connections between others, these connectors can impact large fields in significant ways, though they may be and feel quite remote from mentees because they are working from afar and on a grand scale.
Dr. Wallace described how these types of mentorship have influenced the COVID-19 Global Rheumatology Alliance, which is a grassroots organization that began through connections on Twitter at the beginning of the pandemic. Several innovative mentoring approaches that have been used by this network include 1) involving patients extensively in the steering committee, study design, scientific writing and other endeavors to facilitate bidirectional mentoring between patients and physicians, 2) linking clinicians virtually from across the world to help them work together, and 3) using microgrants to assist investigators in developing countries while also guiding them through proposals, providing feedback and supporting data collection, analysis and presentation activities.
Shortage of Pediatric Rheumatologists
The final speaker in this portion of the summit was Sumaira Farman, MBBS, FRCP, MRCP, MACP, FACR, professor of medicine, National Hospital and Medical Center, Fatima Memorial Hospital College of Medicine and Dentistry, Lahore, Pakistan. Dr. Farman discussed the critical shortage of pediatric rheumatologists in much of the world, particularly in countries with low gross domestic product.
