Mentoring

The principle of mentoring is well-established in education and skills and personal development in business and elsewhere. Dental Protection recognises it as being invaluable as an important stage in learning and honing new skills, and there are many aspects of dentistry for which mentoring is particularly suitable.

Introduction & Definitions

The terms "coaching" and "mentoring" are often confused and loosely applied. This is unhelpful when considering the dento-legal implications, which depend very much upon the nature of the relationship between the two parties.

Mentoring differs from coaching in some subtle, but fundamental ways. Mentoring tends to be longer-term, more informal, and with a wider focus. Mentoring is flexible and driven by the needs of the mentee for guidance and support at any moment in time. In this relationship the mentor passes on knowledge and experience, and generally relies upon having had similar experiences and hence an empathy with the mentee and a close personal understanding of the relevant, specific training and development issues involved. This is not necessarily so in the case of coaching.  Both mentoring and coaching allow the assisted individual to develop their skills and reach their full potential by encouraging, supporting and inspiring them and drawing out the skills of this junior party. Acting in a more holistic way than a conventional trainer, a useful analogy is to consider that a trainer tends to walk in front of the individual, a coach tends to walk behind the individual, while a mentor tends to walk alongside the individual.

Many forms of professional education - in dentistry, just as in other healthcare professions - lack a mentoring component or offer it only in a somewhat random and ill-defined format. Many postgraduate training courses consist of a formal, time-limited teaching episode, with no ongoing component thereafter. In other training programmes, a mentoring phase is firmly embedded as part of a formal, supervised training, and is often interposed between fully supervised and completely independent practise.

Dental Protection is often asked by its members whether they need any additional indemnity when they are training, supervising or advising professional colleagues, either in a formally recognised mentoring capacity, or in a less formal arrangement which otherwise shares many of the same characteristics. Coupled with this, we are often asked if the member is liable for the acts and omissions of the mentee.

Duty of Care

Each individual practitioner has a duty of care to each and every patient in whose treatment they are involved. This duty of care has an ethical as well as a legal dimension and reflecting this fact, one should start from the premise that such a duty of care exists, even when one is not treating the patient personally.

Thus, while a mentor's relationship with the colleague they are mentoring will be self-evident, one should not lose sight of the more subtle and indirect relationship with any patients involved under the care of the mentee, and in relation to whom the mentor might be providing advice.

Depending upon the extent to which there can be shown to be a "master and servant" relationship between the mentor and mentee, it may be possible to argue that the mentor is in some respects vicariously viable for the negligent acts and omissions of the mentee. In a "true" mentoring arrangement, however, it should be clear (and separately confirmed in any relevant documentation regarding the arrangement) that there is no such relationship between the parties, because the mentee is autonomous, working independently and electing to call upon the advice and guidance of the mentor only as and when he/she chooses to, reflecting their own assessment of the need for such assistance. In such circumstances it would be extremely difficult to demonstrate vicarious liability on the part of the mentor.

However, a mentor should not assume from this that they could never be held to be liable for any adverse outcome as a result of the mentee's treatment of a patient. In most cases it is fair to say that they would not, but there will be circumstances in which a mentor could be drawn into civil proceedings such as a negligence claim, or into a GDC complaint/investigation. In the former, the mentor could be named as a primary defendant or co-defendant, or alternatively, could be the subject of a "third party" action, perhaps brought by a mentee who feels aggrieved that s/he has followed the mentor's advice and guidance and has ended up being sued as a result of this.

Training Organisations

If the mentoring is taking place under the auspices of a training organisation (especially one which has approved or endorsed the appointment of a particular individual(s) as mentors) is also possible for proceedings to be brought against this organisation. Under normal arrangements this is less likely to be as a third party to a claim in negligence brought by a patient, but could well be a separate action brought by a dentist/mentee who is himself/herself subject to a claim in negligence by a patient. Another possibility is that the mentor or training organisation is brought into the action by the mentee's indemnifier/insurer. The mentee might then sue the organisation either in negligence (for a breach of the company's duty of care to the mentee) or for breach of contract (if, for example, the organisation has undertaken to provide a level/quality of support which does not materialise on a particular occasions). If the mentee has paid any money to the mentor or to the training organisation, for the provision of the mentoring service, the contractual obligations are even easier to demonstrate.

Dental Protection looks upon a mentoring role as squarely part of one's professional activity, and consequently it falls under the scope of the professional indemnity provided to members of this organisation. No additional subscriptions are payable by the mentor (unless the member in question has opted for membership in a non-clinical category which excludes any involvement in the treatment of patients.  This would not be considered sufficient to provide indemnity for any work carried out in a mentoring capacity).

While members can therefore look to Dental Protection for advice, support and representation in their personal capacity as a mentor, this would not normally extend to indemnifying any corporate or similar entity through which they might provide these services, unless specific arrangements had been made in advance with Dental Protection (i.e. through taking out corporate membership for the organisation itself) to provide for this.

Issued 20^th November 2008