About this Toolkit
This toolkit is a collection of resources that are designed to support administrators and clinicians in planning and implementing a successful clinical mentoring program. The toolkit outlines methods and best practices for clinical mentoring in a variety of settings, and offers documents to support a new or existing clinical mentoring program. The toolkit also offers resources for increasing clinical mentoring capacity through training of additional trainers (TOT).
I-TECH and other individuals and organizations involved in human capacity development designed to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic have recognised the critical importance of clinical mentoring to train health care personnel. To facilitate successful clinical mentoring, I-TECH decided to more precisely define our vision of clinical mentoring and to compile materials useful for clinical mentoring into a single package easily adaptable for use in a variety of scenarios. This toolkit represents the culmination of these efforts.
This toolkit is intended to be used by anyone interested in implementing a clinical mentoring program. Clinicians, administrative staff, program managers, and policy planners represent just a few of the types of individuals who may find this toolkit useful.
To quickly assess what content is included in the toolkit as well as to learn a little about the development process, start with the Toolkit Overview, a brief PowerPoint presentation that describes the toolkit.
Toolkit Sections
The toolkit is divided into seven primary sections, with subcategories under most sections.
- Clinical Mentoring : This section provides a comprehensive introduction to clinical mentoring, including I-TECH's clinical mentoring position piece and a PowerPoint presentation on mentoring.
- Getting Started : The essential information and forms for beginning a clinical mentoring partnership are included in this section. Subsections include Hiring Mentors & Site Preparation, which provides a job description, interview guides, an orientation schedule, and site preparation materials; and Tips for Mentors, a collection of tools for clinicians including ethical considerations, mentoring in resource-constrained settings, and other tools to help the mentor succeed.
- Needs Assessment : This section is broken into two subsections: Provider Competencies and Systems. This category includes forms designed to assess the learning needs of both the primary care providers and the clinical systems.
- Training : This section provides important information on the various Training Methods and Communication styles. These handouts address bedside learning, distance learning, and didactic training, among other training and communication methods. The TOT Worksheets section provides exercises to be used when training clinical mentors and trainers.
- Curricula : Curricula developed by I-TECH for training primary care providers are included in this section. Under Courses various topics pertaining to HIV/AIDS care are presented in formats that will take 3-5 days to present. Workshops offers similar topics, but in a format that can easily be taught in an afternoon. Video includes short films highlighting best practices in primary care.
- Monitoring and Evaluation : The first subcategory, Selecting Methods & Tools, offers instructions for conducting monitoring and evaluation, while the second, Tools, includes documents for use in the various training situations introduced under Training Methods.
- Resources: This section includes materials which can help you build a broader knowledge base and provide resources to enrich your mentoring program. The Reference Materials section provides references and links to websites for further information on clinical mentoring and the treatment of HIV. The Image Library includes I-TECH-owned clinical images and a list of links to other public image libraries. A Glossary of Terms provides definitions of terms commonly used in clinical mentoring.
Use and Adaptation of Materials in this Toolkit
The majority of the documents in this toolkit are designed for re-use, local adaptation, and to serve as a starting point for your work. You are free to adapt, edit, excerpt, share and change most of the tools in this toolkit, we just ask that if you disseminate them widely you acknowledge their source ("Adapted from I-TECH"). Tools and documents in the main sections of the toolkit which are copyrighted and cannot be adapted or reproduced without permission are clearly marked as such.
In the sample curricula, however, there are many images, graphs, and other content for which I-TECH has requested and received specific permission from the copyright holder. You are free to adapt and use the curricula in face-to-face teaching, in fact that's why they're included. But you may not re-publish them, in whole or in part, including re-posting any parts of them to the World Wide Web, since many parts of them are not ours to license to you. So if you wish to include elements of the curricula in any documents you are publishing for dissemination (print or Internet), you will need to seek the permission of I-TECH, and we will point you to the appropriate copyright holders if the material you need is not ours.
In addition, the images used throughout the toolkit as illustrations - on the home page, section pages, etc - are copyrighted and may not be reproduced without permission. (The clinical images in the Image Library section, however, may be used freely in teaching and presentations with acknowledgment to I-TECH.)
The design and programming of the CD-ROM itself is copyrighted - you may not make additional copies or reproduce the entire disk without permission from I-TECH - but we will be happy to send you more copies if you ask.
Finally, all content on the DVD is copyrighted. You may use the DVD for face-to-face teaching but you may not digitize, reproduce, broadcast, or copy the DVD or its contents without permission from I-TECH.
Feedback
The International Training and Education Center on HIV (I-TECH) developed the Clinical Mentoring Toolkit. We would appreciate your feedback on this Toolkit. Please complete the feedback survey and follow the instructions for sending it to I-TECH.
To learn more about getting started with the Toolkit, see Using this Toolkit.