NP Interprofessional Fellowship: Can this innovative method decrease the future preceptor gap?

Background:  A lack of quality nurse practitioner (NP) preceptors and  NP faculty educators has led to frustration and lack of support from medical institutions Faculty support for our future nurse practitioners is becoming limited.  According to Luhanga, Dickieson, & Mossey, 2010, lack of formal collaboration between academia and practice may lead to decisional conflict of the NP student.  Furthermore, it has been identified that many preceptors lack teaching and evaluation skills which negatively effects the students (Seldomridge & Walsh, 2006, Altmann, 2006).

Objectives:   To identify the barriers and facilitators of mentoring new NP graduates into a future precepting role.

Methods:  A one year NP fellowship involving role-modeling and structured mentorship of new NP graduates was designed to highlight the essentials of clinical precepting and provide a framework to assist fellows with career support to precept.   Our faculty dyad consists of an Advanced Practice Registered Nurse and a Physician, who each serve as attending faculty for the NP fellows.   Our faculty model enables a robust co-precepting/mentoring milieu of role-modeling effective precepting techniques.  It is designed to prepare the nurse practitioners as clinician educators with dedicated time to mentor and teach trainees in the delivery of patient care. We collaborated with a local school of nursing as an academic partner.

  

Conclusion:    This transformative method may facilitate nurse practitioner graduates to feel more confident and clinically competent in identifying themselves as clinician educators who participate in the advancement of the nursing profession.  The collaboration with academia providing faculty development may enable NP clinical preceptors to be more prepared and more likely to train NP students.  Our program has offered clinical educators an opportunity to “give back” to our profession (s).

Future research:  To survey nurse practitioners to further delineate the barriers to accepting nurse practitioner students in a clinical precepting role.