Sponsored School(s)
Reviewed by Abbie Jacobs, RN, BSN
As a part of becoming a nurse practitioner, you will have to gain hands-on experience by working with a preceptor. However, many graduate nursing students find locating a preceptor to be a challenging task.
Healthcare facilities receive no money for taking on NPs in training. The situation is different for medical students—facilities get paid for taking them on. Another problem is that working with a preceptor requires ungodly amounts of paperwork that have to be filled out individually for each nursing student. And they are not digitized!
Then came Dino Soriano, Sr., RN, HAS, FNP-C, who went through a torturous process to find his preceptor and had to miss a semester of school during the process. Soriano decided that there had to be a better way.
Advance Healthcare Network for NPs & PAs describes how Soriano set up a company that matches students with preceptors. This enterprising FNP asked institutions if they would precept NPs if they came with the paperwork filled out. The answer was an “overwhelming yes.”
Soriano founded Clinical Match Me which provides an online platform for students to find a preceptor without the stress that he went through. Students provide their location, contact information, type of practice they seek, and details about the paperwork for their school.
Once the applications are received, Nicole Morgan, SSPHR, SCP vets them and look for preceptors that match the student’s request. If she finds a potential match, she contacts the student. Then they start the paperwork process. Applicants must provide their paperwork, or they are not considered.
The fact that Clinical Match Me pays preceptors to teach makes the process of finding them even easier. As of November 2016, the website had helped several hundred students find a preceptor and had 2,000 more in its database.