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Page 178 Ferrari et al. Art Int Surg 2022;2:177-85 https://dx.doi.org/10.20517/ais.2022.16

[1]
War, he left his close friend Mentor to raise his son Telemachus into adulthood . The word “mentor” was
thendescribed in the English language in 1750 and is currently defined in the Oxford Dictionary as a
“person who offers support and guidance to another one”.

Mentorship in surgery is important during different stages of surgical career and provides different forms of
support, including technical and non-technical skills. Mentoring relationships can be classified as informal
[2,3]
or formal . Informal mentoring can be defined as a spontaneous relationship between a senior and a
junior colleague, with the aim to gain experience, knowledge and support. Formal mentoring is usually
controlled by an organization and aims to provide support by following a structured program. Despite the
well-acknowledged importance of receiving adequate support during the various stages of surgical career,
mentorship programs are not widely distributed in surgical departments .
[4]

Mentorship in surgery has been recognized to significantly contribute to career satisfaction, inclusion and
retention, and have a favorable effect on implementing research productivity and achieving personal
development [5-13] .

While mentorship relationships were created within an institution in the past, the increased use of
technology and online platforms have provided the opportunity to build meaningful relationships with
experienced colleagues worldwide [14,15] . This is of particular importance for women belonging to
underrepresented minorities, who might benefit from senior mentors sharing similar gender and ethnical
background .
[16]

Same-gender mentorship seems to play an important role during medical school and the early phase of
surgical career, where close relationships with mentors with similar characteristics might overcome the
reluctance to pursue a surgical career . Georgi et al. demonstrated the efficacy of a structured mentoring
[16]
program conducted with same-gender role models in changing female medical students’ and junior doctors’
perceptions of women in surgery .
[16]
Artificial intelligence (AI) can be defined as the study of algorithms that give machines the ability to reason
and perform cognitive functions such as problem-solving, object and word recognition, and decision-
making. AI has different applications in surgery, including pre-operative planning, intraoperative guidance
and surgical robotics. An additional application of AI is the possible application to improve surgical
mentorship, facilitating communication between mentors and mentees from different institutions.

Acknowledging this, this review summarizes available literature describing the importance of mentorship
during different phases of surgical career, the possibility of receiving career support from senior colleagues
and new initiatives recently developed to provide structured support and also focuses on the importance of
long-distance mentorship and telementoring as possible means to provide support and guidance to future
generations of surgeons.

MENTORSHIP IN DIFFERENT PHASES OF SURGICAL CAREER
Mentorship has been widely acknowledged to play a crucial role during three distinct phases of surgical
career: surgical training, the transition from trainee to attending in the first 3-5 years of practice and the
[8]
mid-career phase . From the different domains in which mentorship is required and the different needs of
mentees during their surgical training and practice, the importance of having more than one mentor is
demonstrated, all of whom play equally valuable roles [17,18] . This phenomenon is described as “mosaic
mentoring” and involves seeking mentors to match specific and sometimes short-term personal or career