# Mentoring to Support Healthcare Professional and Medical Career Progression and Leadership Development

## TL;DR

Mentoring programs help healthcare professionals advance their careers and leadership skills, especially for women.

## Contribution

The paper proposes a new model for mentoring to promote gender equity and leadership advancement for women.

## Key findings

- Mentoring is an evidence-based way to support career progression and leadership development.
- Current mentoring programs often fail to reach their full potential due to inconsistent outcomes.
- A new integrated model is suggested to better support women's advancement in leadership roles.

## Abstract

Mentoring programmes are increasingly used in the health sector to provide career support and guidance for health professionals. However, a number of mentoring experiences and programmes fall short of their potential, with variable outcomes reported. This article summarises the mentoring literature, which clearly demonstrates that mentoring is an important evidence‐informed component of advancing women in leadership. We provide a perspective on mentoring in the context of promoting gender equity within workplaces and propose a new nuanced and integrated model to consider for the advancement of women in leadership.