The Role of Structured Mentorship in the Accelerated Adaptation of Early-Career Orthodontists to Clinical Practice

Citation: Dinara Sokolova, "The Role of Structured Mentorship in the Accelerated Adaptation of Early-Career Orthodontists to Clinical Practice", Universal Library of Medical and Health Sciences, Volume 03, Issue 04.

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This article examines the role of structured mentorship as a system-forming mechanism for accelerating novice orthodontists’ adaptation to clinical practice. The topic’s relevance stems from the widening gap between academic training and the exigencies of the real clinical milieu, where early-career practitioners experience cognitive, organizational, and affective overload. The absence of standardized accompaniment models delays the development of clinical autonomy and heightens the risk of error, rendering the search for a pedagogically validated, organizationally reproducible adaptation model acutely significant for contemporary dental training. The objective of the study is to determine the pedagogical, organizational, and psychological effects of structured mentorship and to justify its place within the architecture of the orthodontist’s professional formation. At the empirical level, an analysis was conducted of 17 sources published from 2019 to 2025, including systematic reviews, randomized controlled trials, and dental school reports. The novelty of the inquiry lies in integrating pedagogical theories and clinical metrics into a unified model of accelerated adaptation for residents, wherein structured mentorship functions not as an auxiliary but as the core technology of the educational process. The principal findings demonstrate that structured mentorship condenses the process of clinical formation, equalizes training quality, enhances interactional satisfaction, and improves the predictability of clinical outcomes. Sustainable implementation requires institutional preconditions: aligning the clinic’s value framework, appointing a coordinator, allocating time and resources, and cultivating a safe-to-err environment that ensures psychological safety for participants. The article will be useful to dental clinic leaders, medical education organizers, residents, and researchers in medical pedagogy seeking to improve the efficiency of early-career adaptation.

Keywords: Structured Mentorship, Resident Adaptation, Medical Education, Clinical Autonomy, Psychological Safety.

https://doi.org/10.70315/uloap.ulmhs.2025.0304003