Mentorship

•  Kaiser Permanente
• Deborah Nakielski, CNM 
• (626)485-9344
• matt.fivesixteen@verizon.net

Interpretive
I think the most important thing I gained from mentorship was the first hand experience. Mentorship allowed me to be in the hospital environment with midwives and other medical professionals. It allowed me to see a lot of the concepts I was learning about in my research in real life. It gave me that hands on experience I wouldn't have been able to obtain else where, especially with a topic such as midwifery. It gave me a jump start as to what I'll be spending the rest of my life doing and provided me with knowledge I'm almost sure many nursing majors won't have in college.

Applied
My mentorship helped me answer my essential question because it allowed me to see a midwife's work ethic which helped greatly with my third answer. My third answer is, "If a midwife is empathetic and supportive, then she will build a strong relationship with her patients while making them feel comfortable and safe." Working closely with Deborah Nakielski allowed me to see that the manner in which you do things and the attitude you carry yourself with makes all the difference in whether the client will enjoy the service being provided to them. It allowed me to see that being a strong practitioner while having the right characteristics is very appealing to women and is what makes them lean towards a midwife led birth. Mentorship also pushed me farther to research more. Whenever I came across something I didn't know about it would make me curious and I would look into and 99% of the time it helped me add more to my answers. For example, during a labor I was able to see and hear a lot about C-section procedures and concepts. I didn't know about the things I was being shown so I went in to research on it and it helped me greatly with answering my essential question. That's how I came up with my first answer, "If a midwife has an extensive knowledge in maternity care, then she can prevent her patient from having a caesarean section." In addition, doing that extra research because of what I had seen with my mentor allowed me to find evidence to back up my first answer.