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Nurse Mentorship is a game-changer for any one in the nursing profession, especially for nurses pursuing CRNA. When done right, it can make all the difference in overcoming the challenges of anesthesia school and advancing in your profession. Nurse mentorship and CRNA mentorship programs provide invaluable guidance, support, and wisdom that goes far beyond the classroom.

In this conversation, Dr. Woodruff and Dr. Wilson, both key faculty within SNAP’s Nurse Anesthesia Program at Ursuline College, share expert insights on the profound impact mentorship has on both personal and professional growth.

You’ll learn how the right mentorship programs can shape your clinical skills, boost your confidence, and help you navigate the highs and lows of the CRNA journey.

Whether you’re seeking mentorship as a student or looking to give back as a mentor, this episode is for you. You’ll also discover why developing a new nurses mentorship program or improving an existing one could be the perfect DNP project idea to enhance nurse anesthesia education and foster the next generation of leaders in the field.

Get access to application & interview preparation resources plus ICU Educational Workshops that have helped thousands of nurses accelerate their CRNA success. Become a member of CRNA School Prep Academy: https://cspaedu.com/join

Get CRNA School insights sent straight to your inbox! Sign up for the CSPA email newsletter: https://www.cspaedu.com/podcast-email

Book a mock interview, resume or personal statement critique, transcript review and more: www.teachrn.com

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Nurse Mentorship & CRNA Mentorship- Why It Matters

Hello, future CRNA. Welcome back to CSPA podcast. I’m so excited about today’s topic, one that is near and dear to my heart, which is why mentorship matters. This episode is going to be presented to you by two very special guest hosts; Dr. Woodruff and Dr. Wilson, who are both part of SNAP’s Nurse Anesthesia Program based out of Ursuline College.

Dr. Woodruff is the Program Director of SNAP, and a dedicated leader in Nurse Institute education. She earned her BSN from Georgetown University in 1994, followed by an MSN in Women’s health in 1998 and her CRNA certification in 2008, both from University of Pennsylvania. In 2017, she completed her DNP at Wilmington University.

Dr. Woodruff serves as a state peer advisor for Pennsylvania through the AANA and is a member of the Pennsylvania Association of Nurse Anesthetist Wellness Committee. She also remains active in clinical practice.

Dr. Wilson, who you may know very well, has been around from the very beginning of CSPA, and is also a very avid mentor. He is the Assistant Program Director through SNAP. He graduated in 1988 from Clemson University with a Bachelor’s in Science and Biology, in 2002 from Midland Technical College with an ADN; in 2006 he graduated from the University of South Carolina School of Medicine with a Master’s in Nurse Anesthesia and in 2022 from the Medical University of South Carolina with his Doctor of Nurse Anesthesia Practice.

In 2023 Dr.Wilson was selected as a fellow of the American Association of Nurse Anesthesiology and recently elected to serve on the AANA Leadership Identification Committee. He also still continues to practice clinically, so I’m so excited to bring these two mentors to you to dive into why mentorship matters. Without further ado, let’s go ahead and get into today’s episode.

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Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Nurse Anesthesia Educators Unplugged. Excited to have all of these wonderful Program Faculty speakers come in from all across the nation to share information with you about anesthesia school acceptance, sharing all the different things that we know you want to hear, from those that are literally in the trenches doing the education and really making the acceptance decisions. Today we have Dr. Stephanie Woodruff with us, she’s with the Somnia Nurse Anesthesia Program, also known as SNAP, who partners with Ursuline College. So glad to have you with us today, Dr. Woodruff.

Thank you, Dr. Wilson. I’m so happy to be here.

So Dr. Woodruff and I have been talking on a number of occasions and really one of the topics that we really keep talking a lot about is mentorship. Obviously we are an academic mentorship program here at CSPA, but there’s so much more behind mentorship and Mentorship Matters is the title of this because truly when you look at it, it makes a difference, doesn’t it?

Oh, absolutely. I’ve been blessed in my life with wonderful mentors and I wouldn’t be here speaking to you today without them.

As we talk about that and as we look at the mentorship, there’s many different areas that nurses pursuing CRNA can be mentored in, right? We’ve got the professional side, you’ve got clinical side, you’ve got academic side. So when you really look at mentorship, what are some of the key factors or key things that our audience here should be looking for when they’re looking at mentors?

Choosing the Right Mentor

Well, first becoming a mentor, you have the ability to impact the future. And I have been mentoring nursing students, nurse practitioner students, nurse anesthetist students, I don’t know for the last 15, 20 years of my life. So you really need to choose the right mentor and not every person is going to be a great fit for you.

The availability, the personality, you have to have a rapport with them. They will help you with the clinical path that you want to encounter. You also have to trust your mentor and your mentor has to be readily available. And if you don’t trust the mentor and you don’t really understand where the mentor’s coming from, then it’s not that mentor’s not right for you. 

Those are some great points there because we sometimes think that just because somebody is perhaps a little bit more experienced in a certain area than us, maybe they’ve been around for a while or maybe they mentored somebody that you know that, “Hey, that’s somebody that can be my mentor.” But I mean it goes way, way beyond that.

Oh, absolutely; it’s a personality thing. Not every mentor can be connected to a mentee. You really have to establish a rapport with them. You have to establish that they’re trustworthy, they’re empathetic. There’s a confidentiality piece. Mentors certainly help decrease the stress for nursing students or applicants trying to get into nursing anesthesia school for instance.

Nurse Mentorship: Mentorship is key to shaping the next generation of nurse anesthetists.

And mentorship doesn’t stop when you get into nursing school or get into graduate school. It just continues and it continues throughout school. I still keep in contact with my mentors. Like I said, I’ve had mentors my entire life since I was 16 years old, and one of my wonderful mentors is still my program director, Dr. Maria Magro van Pelt, a shout to her. She has been a fantastic mentor for me half of my life.

So you’ve done a lot of work with education over the years, multiple different programs that you’ve been a part of; obviously SNAP and the program that you’re with now. You’ve been in education how many years?

I’ve been in education, it’s going to be 11 or 12 years I think for anesthesia; I’ve been a nurse for over 30 years. I was in education for undergraduate nursing. I was in education for nurse practitioner and now I’m in education for anesthesia for almost 11 years.

So really great to know that because as we’re looking at this, a lot of times our individuals and some of our audience may think mentorship stops at a certain point, but it never stops; really, you can be a mentor and a mentee.

Absolutely. It’s just the baton. You pass off the baton. So if you have a wonderful mentor during school, then you graduate from school and then you actually mentor nursing students or nurse applicants who are getting into nursing anesthesia school, you mentor them. So mentorship doesn’t stop when you graduate from school.

Paying it Forward as a CRNA Mentor

When you graduate from school, you may be a preceptor one month after graduation, and it’s up to you how you want to precept and how you want to mentor. Maybe you were not treated so nicely in your clinical site, so maybe you want to become that person to promote education and to promote a safe place for the nurse anesthesia students.

That’s one of the reasons why I came into education for anesthesia. I had fantastic clinical sites. Sometimes I wasn’t treated nicely. Sometimes I was treated like gold, but I am a huge student advocate. I will always have the students’ back, and I think it’s really important for our future for educating safe, qualified nurse anesthetists.

Now, when you talk about also looking at mentors, and we’re going to really look at both mentor and mentee here with this question, there are things that you kind of have to think about, right? There are guards you have to let down both as a mentor and a mentee in the fact that as a mentor, I may not know everything, and so I’m going to learn from my mentee, but also as a mentee, understanding that the level of experience that a mentor may have is playing into the advice and the interactions that you’re having with them.

And it’s okay not to know everything. So if you do not know the answer, if you do not know that career pathway, then it’s all about networking. Your mentor should just connect you with another mentor, and that mentor connect you with another mentor. It doesn’t stop.

You get to choose who you want to be mentored by. Let’s just say for example, you want to do a pain fellowship after you graduate and your mentor did not graduate from a pain fellowship. I guarantee your CRNA mentor knows somebody who knows somebody who can connect you. It’s all about networking. Absolutely.

CRNA- Where Everybody Knows Everybody

That’s great too because there’s 61,000 nurse anesthetists right now across the nation, but we always talk about it being a small community and it really is about one or two degrees away from being able to find somebody that can assist you and help you with that personal growth or that advancement because we are advancing the profession of nurse anesthesia. And mentoring is part of that- mentoring that next generation that’s coming through. As I speak about generations, what are some of your thoughts about how generational differences play into the ideas of mentor/mentee relationships?

As we know, all nurse anesthesia programs in 2022 had to become DNP for the degree, but not all CRNAs have DNP. Eventually those CRNAs will replace the CRNAs who have the MSN, but really nurse anesthesia started out as a certificate program. And so there is a generational gap between certificate, masters and DNP CRNAs.

Now, unfortunately, the best CRNA mentors that I’ve had in the clinical sites are certificate CRNAs who are absolutely fantastic, but they are retiring. So now you have the masters prepared CRNAs, and eventually the masters prepared CRNAs will be replaced by the DNP CRNAs.

So when you are in the clinical site and you are in school for a DNP, you are a nursing leader. And if you have a mentor who is an MSN CRNA, that’s fantastic too. They may not be able to understand the avenues of the DNP project, but I guarantee their clinical attributes are superb.

Great point here; so maybe you do have somebody that is superb in a clinical aspect of this. And I know that through my career, 17 years in anesthesia now, I’ve had many, many, many mentors that got me to where I’m at today. It was never one mentor and that was it. There are mentors that we have on the education side, academic that we’re all involved in.

There’s mentors that when I look on the clinical side and how they pulled me through some of the cases and taught me; then there’s mentors on the legislative or advocacy side that are completely different from the other two. So it’s all about making sure that you are open and I guess looking for and seeking out those mentors in these specific areas that you need to grow.

That’s a great point because you have mentors in different aspects of your life. I’ve had many, many wonderful clinical mentors who have helped me from the day that I started my anesthesia journey all the way up until now. I still am being taught even 15 years in anesthesia.

But not every clinical mentor is a good academic mentor, so then you may have an academic mentor, which I do, and an academic mentor can help you with your career path if that’s the way you want to go. And a political mentor, my goodness, there are so many CRNA advocates out there, you just reach out to your state association and they will hook you up if that’s what you want to do.

So what I say to my kids, the world is your oyster. You can have so many mentors, there’s so many aspects of this career that you can go down. You will never ever meet a nurse anesthetist who doesn’t love their job. They may not like where they work, but they love their job, they love their profession.

And like what Dr. Wilson said, it is a small community in nurse anesthesia and nurse mentorship. So it really is that one person knows another person, who knows another person, and we’re all here together.

Overcoming Challenges with Effective Nurse Mentorship

This next question might be the hardest question of the whole podcast today.

Oh boy.

What we’re going to look at here is, what happens when that mentor doesn’t work out? What happens when I’m in the clinical setting, either in the ICU or in the anesthesia setting, and my mentor is not working out, we’re not seeing eye to eye? Maybe we don’t agree on something. Maybe it’s time for me to move on to look for another mentor because we have just tried to work it out and it’s not, how do we address that? What are some of the steps? 

We’re trying to train you to be nursing leaders. You’re all adult learners, so you really need to take it head on and have an adult conversation with your mentor and say, “I’m not seeing eye to eye with you. I really appreciate your time and energy that you have taken to mentor me. However, I’m going to go with this person to be mentored.” Or “Do you have suggestions of somebody else that I could be mentored with?” That happens all the time.

It may be a personality conflict or your mentor may just have too many mentees, or your mentor is overworked or overtired, or you have no idea what is beyond the facade of the person. Everybody has a story. That doesn’t necessarily mean that mentor’s a bad person, maybe the mentor’s having some other problems at home that they can’t put the time and energy into you.

There are so many people who are student supporters. So either you go to your clinical preceptor, your clinical coordinator, your academic partner, your assistant program director, your program director, and we’ll find you another mentor. And that will happen with your DNP projects as well. I had to change mentors, and it was very stressful, but it was very necessary. As an adult learner and as a nursing leader, this is not the first time that’s going to happen to you.

DNP Project Idea- CRNA Mentorship Program

Now that you’ve mentioned DNP projects, and we’ve talked about that a couple of times, we’re starting to see within a lot of these programs, and obviously within the social media aspects that we’re in, mentorship’s becoming a huge, huge researched area.

Nurse mentorship is becoming a big deal as we look at how we grow the next group of nursing leaders, the next group of nurse anesthetists, those that are listening to this podcast who are really going to be taking our profession to the next level.

Oh, absolutely. This is a fantastic DNP project. Nurse anesthesia programs have mentorship programs, but maybe you can enhance them. Mentorship for senior students and junior students is so important. As we all know, in nursing anesthesia school, you’re stressed, you have anxiety, you can’t sleep. But if you have a mentor, a senior student mentor, a student that’s above you, that’s great.

And guess what? Like I said before, it doesn’t stop when you graduate. So this is actually for the future of CRNAs because you learn how to mentor when you’re in school, and then when you graduate, you mentor somebody else and you mentor somebody else, then you mentor somebody else. It doesn’t stop there.

Nurse Mentorship: Why Mentorship Matters w. Dr. Richard Wilson, DNAP, CRNA and Dr. Stephanie Woodruff, DNP, CRNA, CHSE Share on X

One thing I throw in there too, is to always remember there’s going to be positives and negatives in every mentorship relationship. So every time that you are with somebody, there’s going to be things you take from it that you really, really like and that you’re going to make sure you utilize, the same with anesthesia practice as you’re learning underneath the preceptors. Then there’s going to be things you’re like, “Okay, I’m never going to do that again.”

The Role of Mentorship in Advancing the CRNA Profession

And to be honest, when we look at the mentorship research out there now, it’s in all different kind of areas. It’s the mentorship of how to get adjusted to doing the anesthesia school research and mentorship on how to get through anesthesia school, how to get into the transition from being a nurse anesthesia student to being a CRNA.

It’s the mentorship on advocacy and how do we as a profession push more people into being advocates and having an active role in that. So definitely dive into that literature and look out there and make sure you’re seeing what’s going on. Anything in particular that you have seen in the literature?

There are lots and lots of papers and projects, DNP projects, PhD projects about mentorship and how it decreases anxiety for the students. It helps with professional development. It decreases burnout. It increases your retention in your own professional capabilities.

One thing that you pointed out, Dr. Wilson, is that it’s so important to just take what you want from each mentor, and then you have your own cookbook. So you take a little bit of this and a little bit of this and a little bit of this, and then that’s how you mentor your mentee. It’s the same thing like you said, with anesthesia clinical practice. It is the art of anesthesia. There’s always different ways to do it. So you just take a little piece of everybody, you provide safe anesthesia and you cannot go wrong.

One thing as you’re kind of talking about that that popped in my mind is anesthesia in itself. The practice and the art of anesthesia is always a lifelong learning process. I do a lot of opioid free anesthesia now, or opioid sparing anesthesia where if you go back and look at what I did 10 years ago, it was nothing for me to give 10ccs of fentanyl to a patient. But I learned a lot over the years about the effects that had and so forth.

Nurse Mentorship for Different Phases of Your Career

Mentorship’s the same way- mentorship really is a lifelong learning process because when we look at how we mentored or even shadowed with people back in the early two thousands versus how mentorships are looked at today, they’re different. We approach them differently.

This is a great example. So I’ve been a nurse anesthetist for 15 years. The first 10 years I provided anesthesia in an ACT model, an anesthesia care team model. Learned a lot. I had a great time. It was at a trauma center. I absolutely loved where I work. Then I transitioned into an ambulatory surgical center where the CRNAs were independent. So I needed mentors to help me convert from an ACT model to a CRNA-only practice.

Nurse Mentorship: Mentorship decreases anxiety and burnout, helps with professional development and increases retention in your own professional capabilities.

So like I said, mentorship doesn’t stop once you graduate. It doesn’t stop when you’re as old as I am. But yes, you’ll have mentorships along your way. Another example is the pain fellowship. Cardiac, pediatric, let’s just say you’ve been an anesthetist for 10 years and you want to be a pediatric anesthetist. You find a mentor and then they will help you. If you’ve been an anesthetist for 15 years and you’ve never done an epidural and spinal outside of school and you really, really want to do O.B., then you seek those opportunities.

I can tell you that because again, opioid free opioid sparing is a big deal for me. Now, it wasn’t until probably about four or five years ago that I really got into that. And it was several CRNAs that I randomly reached out to that I knew did this technique. I just randomly reached out to them and was like, “Hey, I want to start doing some of this. I need some guidance. What are you doing? How are you doing this?”

And I still message them today to find out, what are we doing differently now if I’m doing X, Y, and Z? What do y’all think? So these mentors are huge no matter where you’re at in your practice. Alright, so we’re getting to the point here at the end and wrapping it up. 

We could talk about this forever.

We could, you know, it’s a big topic. It’s an important topic, but give me your summary. Give me the top three things that our listeners, nurses and aspiring CRNAs, really need to know and think about when they’re looking at mentors. Nurse mentorship, what are the big key facts here?

You’re not going to jive with everybody. So if you don’t connect with one mentor, go to another. If you don’t connect with that person, go to another, you will connect with somebody. And mentorship is very, very important. It decreases stress, anxiety and burnout and increases your retention in the program. Just have fun with it. Have an open mind. Once you connect with that mentor, they’re for life. 

Alright, Dr. Woodruff, thank you. Now as I close every session out, we always appreciate our academic colleagues coming on here and sharing their wealth of knowledge with our audience.

Tell us about SNAP; SNAP is a new program. I think y’all are about to really look at your second cohort that you’re about to admit, but you’ve got kind of a unique situation of what you’re working with. So tell our audience a little bit about what it’s all about.

Ursuline College with SNAP DNP Nurse Anesthesia Program

Oh, thanks Dr. Wilson. So we were accredited in November of 2023 and it’s Ursuline College with SNAP; it’s a collaboration between an academic institution and a private anesthesia company. So I work for SNAP and we collaborated with Ursuline College based out of Pepper Pike, Ohio. It is three years long and is a DNP nursing anesthesia program and it is online.

All nursing anesthesia classes are synchronous, which is live talking just like we’re doing right now. And then the DNP classes are asynchronous. What is so new and unique about this is the program comes to you. We have clinical hubs across the United States; currently we have Washington, Ohio, Alabama, Florida, and Tennessee. 

With those hubs, our mission is to increase the amount of CRNAs within the state borders. I can’t guarantee this, but we would like to find all clinical rotations within that state. Can’t guarantee it, but to increase the number of CRNAs in that state, the students are required to come back on campus three times in 36 months for a simulation immersion. The first one is basics of anesthesia. The second one is hands-on O.B., pediatric, difficult airway, and the third one is peripheral nerve blocks. So if you haven’t already, follow us on social media. SNAP CRNA. We are on Facebook, Instagram, Threads and TikTok.

Interesting concept behind what you were talking about with the synchronous virtual learning. There’s a lot that goes into that to be successful.

Thanks so much for having me on. This is a fantastic subject and if anybody needs to reach out or needs a mentor, I’m always available.

Thank you, Dr. Woodruff, thank you for joining us today. Audience, we hope this has been really helpful for you as you look at your journey of getting into and through anesthesia school. And until next time, see you.

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Stay strong. We’re rooting for you, future CRNA!

Important Links

Join the Free CSPA Community! Connect with Aspiring CRNAs, Nurse Anesthesia Residents, practicing CRNAs, and CRNA Program Faculty Mentors who are ready to support you. Get real answers and expert guidance in a welcoming space that’s free from misinformation and negativity. You don’t have to do this alone! Join Now: https://www.cspaedu.com/community

Get access to application & interview preparation resources plus ICU Educational Workshops that have helped thousands of nurses accelerate their CRNA success. Become a member of CRNA School Prep Academy: https://cspaedu.com/join

Get CRNA School insights sent straight to your inbox! Sign up for the CSPA email newsletter: https://www.cspaedu.com/podcast-email

Book a mock interview, resume or personal statement critique, transcript review and more: www.teachrn.com

Learn More About Ursuline College with SNAP DNP Nurse Anesthesia Program: https://www.ursuline.edu/academics/programs/dnp-nurse-anesthesia