Faculty Excellence: Navigating the Highly Competitive Clinical Preceptor Crossroads

Access to affordable care, health care provider shortages, and consumer demands have become paramount issues for Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRN's) as we move into the Affordable Care Act Era. Never before have the professional APRN faculty responsibilities been more exciting, challenging, ever changing, or more cumbersome. One overriding academic responsibility is the need to procure optimal preceptor clinical sites for their advanced practice students.  As we all remember back to the time of being a graduate student facing   challenges of work, family, and school; finding preceptors was difficult and finding great preceptors became even more challenging. Organized and efficient interventions from a faculty perspective are imperative to facilitate student clinical placement. Currently, universities are having higher enrollments; to meet these health care demands, more programs are being developed, and there are more requests from students to complete required clinical experiences with APRN's nationwide. This session will provide effective strategies to develop faculty tools to facilitate optimal preceptor and clinical site procurement in a time efficient and well organized manner. Specific strategies for this presentation are to focus on development of a "roadmap" to develop expertise that will serve the faculty, student, preceptor, patients, and the advanced practice profession.