Precepting a Bradley University NP student

What the role involves

Bradley's graduate nursing programs are online, and their students are practicing RNs who complete clinical hours near home under preceptors they choose. The student arranges the schedule with you; in Bradley's 2017 preceptor webinar most students came one or two days a week. Hours begin on the first day of the Bradley term and not before, and the student records each day's hours and patient data in Typhon within seven days.

Each practicum course has its own hour target. Family nurse practitioner students complete 100, 150, 200 and 300 hours across four courses; psychiatric mental health students complete 200, 250 and 150 in their precepted courses; adult-gerontology students complete 50 hours in a diagnostic reasoning course, then 200, 200 and 300. Bradley's semesters run 15 weeks, split into two 7-week terms, so ask the student which window their course uses.

You supervise, teach and evaluate. If you see unsafe practice, the Graduate Student Handbook says you tell the student, may ask them to leave, document what happened and report it to the course instructor; faculty then meet within 24 hours.

What Bradley asks you to sign and send

Paperwork comes as a preceptor packet in DocuSign, due at the halfway point of the term before the student's course. In Bradley's 2017 webinar the packet held an initial preceptor agreement form with your site address and the course, a sheet of preceptor tips, and an evaluation form you complete on the student.

You also supply copies of your license, your malpractice insurance and a current CV. The 2017 webinar put approval at about five business days after a complete packet arrived. When the same student returned for a later course, only the one-page agreement form was needed again, plus updated documents if yours had expired, and a preceptor could be reused up to twice.

The current forms sit in the student's per-track clinical packet, so today's wording may differ from the 2017 version. The preceptor packet page follows the current process step by step.

If your health system has its own student process

Some large systems route students through their own channels, and those rules sit alongside Bradley's. Advocate Health Care, for example, uses myClinicalExchange, lets physicians or APRNs precept NP students, and requires a three-way agreement between the hospital, the school and the outside employer when the preceptor is not an Advocate employee. Advocate says that agreement can take up to three months, and that its preceptors cannot sign preceptor agreements presented by a school.

Northwestern Medicine's north and northwest suburban sites accept NP students only from schools with a current affiliation agreement and ask applicants to allow four to eight weeks for a response. Carle Health, which now runs Methodist, Proctor and Pekin hospitals in the Peoria area, takes an online clinical rotation application. Check with your organization's education office first, then see sites with their own processes.