News Releases

NEONI Survey Confirms Challenges for Non-Acute Care Nursing Student Clinical Experience

In September 2014, the academic partners of NEONI, The Center for Health Affairs workforce initiative, were surveyed in order to gain insight into the non-acute care settings utilized for nursing student clinical experience. A total of 32 academic partners were invited to participate in the survey. Of these, 20 surveys were completed, which represents a response rate of 62 percent.

The survey results confirmed the non-acute care nursing student clinical experience challenges. These findings come as no surprise since the challenges associated with clinical placements were the very concerns that were brought to The Center’s NEONI staff by the academic partners.

Some of the key nursing student clinical experience challenges include:

• Some hospital partners have been focusing on increasing their BSN workforce and have been mostly accepting the BSN students versus AD and LPN students. Survey results confirmed:
  
  
  • 45 percent of respondents reported placing Bachelor of Science in Nursing students
  • 40 percent reported placing Associate Degree in Nursing students
  • 20 percent place Licensed Practical Nursing students o 10 percent Master of Science in Nursing
  • 5 percent doctorate-level students.
• Additional challenges for all academic partners involve placements in the specialty areas obstetrics, pediatrics, and psychiatry. The clinical unit rotations most commonly cited by respondents as being hard to find placements for were:
  
  
  • obstetrics (90 percent)
  • pediatrics (84 percent)
  • psychiatry (79 percent)
• In addition to the location of adequate clinical sites is the challenge associated with the competency and experience of both academic clinical faculty as well as hospital preceptors. According to survey results from the NEONI Gap Project:
  
  
  • 90 percent of hospital preceptors have zero to four hours of preceptor education. 

View the nursing student clinical experience survey summary in its entirety, as well as suggestions for solutions to the above challenges here.