Reducing student anxiety by using clinical peer mentoring with beginning nursing students.

Beginning nursing students' initial clinical experience can be stressful and intimidating, particularly for young students having no prior healthcare experience. The authors discuss a peer mentoring project that was used to reduce anxiety during the students' first hospital experience. Both the mentored freshmen and the sophomore medical-surgical students who served as mentors reported benefits such as less anxiety, a less stressful clinical learning environment, and an increase in student interaction at various levels in the curriculum.