Building the Road to Sustainability: Preceptor Relationships in Advanced Practice Nursing Education

The study will aim to identify how to build preceptor relationships to promote retention and sustainability of advanced nursing education clinical preceptors within rural communities. Unique barriers exist within the rural environment that can hinder the retention of qualified family practice preceptors. Supply of appropriate preceptors is not keeping up with the increased numbers of students participating in advanced nursing education programs. The constant demand on the small pool of preceptors within these communities are causing current preceptors to "take a break" or decline students for certain periods of time. Preceptors in these small local communities also cite lack of support from their organization, decreased productivity, increased time demands and lack of confidence as barriers to precepting (Morgan et al., 2017). Lack of confidence was addressed with the development of a preceptor handbook with education and direction for the preceptors. The ANEW (Advanced Nursing Education Workforce) grant prompted this resource, it has been disseminated to two cohorts of a BSN-DNP program within a rural community. Discussion of whether the handbook has been useful to the preceptors will be evaluated, with hopes that at least one barrier will be removed. The study will evaluate ways to sustain, build and maintain preceptor relationships for advanced practice graduate nursing programs within rural communities. Data will be gathered from area preceptors to assess what barriers exist when providing clinical education to students. It will also ask what incentives would increase clinical preceptors and promote retention of the current preceptors. Incentive cited in other studies included remuneration, increased confidence, continuing education and access to library/facility development (Morgan et al., 2017). Data collection will be from survey monkey, with all identifiers removed and occur between December 2018-February 2019. The subjects will benefit from recognizing and attempting to decrease barriers that prevent them from precepting. Adopting suggestions from the research could potentially increase preceptors for the program while decreasing the current preceptor burden in the surrounding communities. The field of nursing can benefit by implementing the results into advanced practice clinical rotations allowing for an experiential clinical education for both the subjects and the students. The results of the study will be submitted to an innovation grant in hopes of providing funding for implementation of the suggestions. Finding preceptors is becoming increasingly more difficult for advanced practice nursing students, this study hopes to assist in increasing retention and sustainability of advanced nursing education in rural communities.