Medical mentorship in Afghanistan: How are military mentors perceived by Afghan health care providers?

BACKGROUND: Previous work has been published on the experiences of high-resource setting physicians mentoring in low-resource environments. However, not much is known about what mentees think about their First World mentors. We had the opportunity to explore this question in an Afghan Army Hospital, and we believe this is the first time this has been studied. METHODS: We conducted a pilot cross-sectional survey of Afghan health care providers evaluating their Canadian mentors. We created a culturally appropriate 19- question survey with 5-point Likert scores that was then translated into the local Afghan language. The survey questions were based on domains of Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada's CanMEDS criteria. RESULTS: The survey response rate was 90% (36 of 40). The respondents included 13 physicians, 21 nurses and 2 other health care professionals. Overall, most of the Afghan health care workers felt that working with mentors from high-resource settings was a positive experience (median 4.0, interquartile range [IQR] 4-4), according to CanMEDS domains. However, respondents indicated that the mentors were reliant on medical technology for diagnosis (median 5.0, IQR 4-5) and failed to consider the limited resources available in Afghanistan. CONCLUSION: The overall impression of Afghan health care providers was that mentors are appropriate and helpful. CanMEDS can be used as a framework to evaluate mentors in low-resource conflict environments.