Mentoring needs and family medicine faculty.

Mentor relationships have long been advocated as an important mechanism for facilitating the personal and professional development of junior members of a profession. The relative youth of the discipline of family medicine and the bimodal age distribution of its members limit the availability of mentors for junior faculty. Junior faculty members seeking mentor relationships can benefit from taking a proactive approach to identifying needs likely to be met by a mentor. These needs include: professional socialization, role modeling, nurturing, teaching, and advocacy. Multiple mentors may be required to meet these needs. Family medicine departments can foster mentor relationships by providing formal and informal mechanisms for interaction between junior faculty members and the senior faculty within and outside the department. Future research which characterizes successful components of mentor relationships and examines creative ways of meeting mentoring needs would benefit the discipline of family medicine.