The role of mentoring and mentoring relationships has been the focus of attention in education circles where interest has grown in developing lifelong learning skills. To this end, mentoring programs and services have been used in education and health care training fields as well as in business settings, to prepare new practitioners.

According to the literature, mentoring has been used to effectively transfer knowledge into practice. When mentoring does occur, there are benefits for those who receive mentoring; those who do mentoring and those involved in the operation of mentoring programs. Accordingly, the satisfaction derived by individuals engaged in mentoring, also, translates into benefits for the organization that promotes mentoring.

This study attempted to answer three distinct but inseparable questions. First, is mentoring occurring between health care students and members of the health care faculty at the New York Chiropractic College (NYCC)? Second, what perceptions do health care students and faculty hold about the benefits of mentoring and mentoring relationships? Third, do the perceptions of health care faculty and health care students on cross-gender and cross-ethnic mentoring influence the perceived benefits of mentoring and mentoring relationships at this health care training setting?

This study employed a mixed case study design and primarily, is interpretative in nature. Those factors within the organization of health care training and teaching that fostered health care student's interactions with members of the health care faculty were analyzed to determine whether these interactions resulted in establishing mentoring relationships. The study findings indicated that mentoring, in fact, occurred during health care training at the NYCC; faculty and students both reported that they perceived there were benefits for entering into mentoring relationships in a health care training setting; and faculty and students both reported that cross-ethnic and cross-gender issues did not affect the perceived benefits of mentoring received by students or given by faculty. This study established a need for mentoring at the different stages of chiropractic training and concluded with some recommendations to the New York Chiropractic College.