Interprofessional Precepting and Mentoring: An Innovation to NP Training

In this established Nurse Practitioner (NP) Fellowship within the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Center of Excellence in Primary Care Education (CoEPC), the NPs participate in an interprofessional team-based care model in which they are clinically supervised by an NP/MD faculty dyad.  The dyad consists of an advanced practice registered nurse and a physician as their attending faculty.  The trainee team can include nurse practitioners, physician residents, health psychology post-doctoral fellows, undergraduate nursing students, physician assistant students and pharmacy residents. This faculty model allows for a rich co-precepting/mentoring mileu role-modeling effective interprofessional partnership in the supervision of clinical care in the primary care setting.   This model places the nurse practitioner as a clinician educator with dedicated time to mentor and teach trainees in the delivery of health care.  It brings interprofessional  trainees together to learn to be effective team members who are fully integrated into team activities that support patient-centered care.  This model embraces a robust platform to foster team development, leadership and clinical skills by partnering physician and nurse practitioner’s as clinician educator partners.  This model leads to solid relationships, trust, and continuous interaction with improved team performance. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with NP Fellows during their training year and analyzed for common experiences and insights surrounding interprofessional precepting and mentoring. Three resultant themes emerged; team-building aptitudes, identifying self as a clinician, and nurturing leadership ability. The findings of the qualitative study strongly suggest that there is value in interprofessional precepting/mentoring for nursing graduate and post-graduate training programs as a model for clinical education in the primary care setting. This change in paradigm could facilitate nurse practitioner students/graduates identifying themselves not only as members of a clinical team in delivering high quality patient-centered care, but as future clinician educators who participate in the advancement of their chosen profession.