Socialization and Mentoring

Abstract

Nurses today have many entries and exits from the health care workplace. Nurses change clinical specialities with ease and leave employers for childbirth or childcare, to care for elderly parents, for advanced education, or for international nursing experience. Sometimes they return, often years later, as re-entry or "new" nurses. Nurses also change from full-time to part-time employment and back again. They enter nursing for the first, second, or third time as young adults, in middle age, or as seniors and they come from diverse ethnic, religious, and social backgrounds. Many are educated in one country but practice in several countries. Given this individual variation as well as diversity in practice patterns, how these nurses are socialized and resocialized in the health care workplace in the 21st century is of profound importance.