You’re probably well aware that modern healthcare has been shaped by shortages. Those shortages were exacerbated during the pandemic, when doctors, nurses, and technicians left for any number of personal or safety concerns. They were actually in the making well before then.
The actual problem has less to do with a once-in-a-generation pandemic and more to do with the talent pipeline. To put it simply, more people leave nursing than enter it. This makes the mechanics of the credentialing process very important.
In this article, we take a look at two professionals who quietly shape the number of nurses that actually graduate.
Nurse Preceptors
During nursing education, students spend their time divided between the classroom and the clinical setting. They get classroom learning, naturally enough, facilitated by teachers, but once they get to clinical rotations, they are working in actual hospitals with real patients and a preexisting staff.
Within that staff are nursing preceptors.
Nursing preceptors are working RNs who essentially agree to supervise the clinical hours of aspiring nurses. If you’re familiar with the education credentialing process, you might find their role comparable to that of a teacher who supervises a semester of student teaching.
The preceptor is there to model good work habits, answer questions, and support nursing students as they complete their clinicals.
Why Are Preceptors Impacting How Many People Graduate?
There are two basic reasons.
One is simply infrastructural. The healthcare system needs an adequate supply of preceptors to ensure that nurses in training are receiving adequate attention during their clinical rotations. Naturally, most schools find ways to work around preceptor shortages, but the more there are, the stronger the talent pipeline itself is.
The other reason is that nursing preceptors can, in the best of circumstances, form genuinely helpful relationships with the students they work with.
Approximately half of all new nurses leave the profession entirely within five years. Often, this is because the job winds up being more stressful than they anticipated. They knew healthcare was hard. They simply weren’t adequately prepared for how those challenges would scale to a 45- or 50-hour workweek.
Having someone you can talk to who understands the struggle and is able to talk about what to expect can go a long way toward keeping nurses in the profession as they get through school and then eventually begin working in their first real career placements.
Nurse Educators
Nurse educators represent the classroom side of the credentialing process. They are typically RNs who formerly worked in a clinical setting and are now focused primarily on education. In addition to their nursing credentials, they will typically also have a qualification that prepares them for classroom teaching.
The value of a good nurse educator is easier to grasp than that of a preceptor. Anyone who has been in college before can understand the impact of a good teacher.
Nurse educators set the tone for what a candidate expects in their career. They also give students the support they need to navigate challenges while equipping them with the knowledge required to understand the nuances of a constantly changing healthcare system.
Like a good preceptor, an excellent nurse educator will be able to offer both knowledge and mentorship, ensuring that nursing students have the best possible chance of a successful career.
Paradoxically, part of the nurse educator’s job may involve steering bad-fit candidates away from the profession. This may sound like an odd responsibility in a field characterized by shortages, but it actually plays an important role in solving the larger issue of healthcare staffing concerns.
Remember that shortages are currently being caused by high turnover among younger nurses. Unfortunately, turnover in professional settings—particularly in healthcare—is contagious. When a young nurse enters a workplace and then leaves the profession three years later, they create scheduling problems and workflow issues that could lead other nurses to turn over as well.
By weeding out bad-fit candidates before things get that far, nurse educators help protect the profession as a whole.
Other Factors Affecting Graduation Rates
While the professionals who operate on both sides of the nursing education spectrum are extremely important, they ultimately represent only a sliver of the personnel-related infrastructure responsible for creating new nurses.
Other factors influencing how many people graduate include:
- Accessibility: Being able to access online universities, accelerated programs, or evening school can widen the potential candidate pool considerably, making nursing more appealing to people who have to work day jobs, raise a family, or attend to other responsibilities while earning their degree.
- Diversity of Recruitment: It’s been shown that recruitment materials widely skew toward a white female audience in the world of nursing. By diversifying outreach efforts, nursing programs can attract a wider candidate pool and more robust political support.
- The Quality of Clinical Rotations: Clinical rotations are often the biggest differentiating factor in determining how successful a new nurse will be. By strengthening clinical opportunities and practical resources, schools can ensure their students are better equipped to meet the challenges ahead.
The issues facing healthcare are multifaceted and complex, but at the end of the day, if the goal is more and better candidates, the pipeline that creates them is an important asset in strengthening the field as a whole.
Conclusion
If you are a nursing student candidate, the information in this article could potentially be very influential to your overall educational experience.
At the end of the day, any accredited nursing school will get you your certification, provided you complete all of the requisite work. That said, if you’re going to go through the trouble of four years of education alongside clinical rotations and standardized testing requirements, you might as well make sure that the work is building toward a rewarding long-term career, right?
To increase the odds of this, speak with the admissions office to learn more about the support resources they provide students. Are there mentorship opportunities associated with the nurse educator or preceptor roles? How many cooperating preceptors does the program have relationships with? What additional clinical support materials are provided by the university?
Also, don’t be afraid to ask about job placement rates and NCLEX pass-rate metrics. Many universities track this information and are happy to provide it to prospective students.
Bottom line: The better your education, the more likely you are to have a successful career as a nurse.
