Background: Mentoring has been recognized as fundamental to success in career development in young practitioners. An efficient mentoring can improve residents’ learning and enhance their personal and professional skills. In resident training, cooperation and participation from both faculty and residents are key in implementing a mentoring program. Different set of frameworks of core competencies have been described in pediatrics residency training. However, the competencies for the mentoring program within pediatrics residency training never been reported. Thus, we sought to identify and establish core competency for a mentoring program in pediatrics postgraduate residency training. Methods: A convenience sample of all the faculty members and residents at the Department of Pediatrics in King Abdulaziz Medical City-Riyadh was recruited for the study. A self-administered questionnaire with 43 items covering the CanMEDS core competencies was used. The seven core competencies of CanMEDS were Medical expert, Communicator, Scholar, Professional, Manager, Health Advocate, and Collaborator. Result: The faulty response rate was 76% (n=44 / 58) and residents was 91% (n=62 / 68). Nearly all faculty members and residents reported mentoring to be very important in Pediatrics. Two-thirds of the residents and faculty members reported mentoring to had an important influence on their career. The Medical expert, Scholar, Manager, and Collaborator were identified as essential for mentoring out of all seven core competencies.
Conclusion: Most of the pediatric residents and faculty surveyed identified mentoring as an important element in Pediatrics. More than two third of the faculty and residents have experienced mentoring at some point in their career and 75% of the faculty members recognize their important role in mentoring the residents. We were able to identify Medical expert, Scholar, Manager, and collaborator as the key core competencies for the mentoring program in pediatrics, reported by both residents and the faculty.