Challenges of Implementing the Preceptorship Model in Clinical Nursing Education from the perspective of Faculty Members, Instructors, and Nursing Students at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences

The preceptorship model is one of the well-known clinical nursing education strategies that transfer experiences from experienced nurses to nursing students and novice nurses. This study endeavored to identify the challenges of implementing this model in clinical nursing education from the perspective of faculty members, instructors, and nursing students of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences.

The study was conducted with a qualitative approach by the content analysis method. Semi-structured interviews were employed to collect data. Interviewees were selected through purposive sampling from faculty members, instructors, and nursing students of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences. Parallel with the interviews, content analysis was performed according to Landman and Grenham's methods.

A total of 15 interviews were conducted and analyzed. According to the findings, possible barriers during the effective implementation of this model were: lack of nursing staff, lack of skilled nurses as preceptors, lack of sufficient interaction between educational and clinical system, lack of necessary support from hospital executives, and poor relationship between physicians and nurses. In this study, 18 major strategies for the successful implementation of the preceptorship model were presented. The importance of them were allocating material and spiritual incentives to motivate the preceptors; interaction between the nursing school and hospitals in training nursing students, involving hospital managers and officials in implementing the model; the collaboration of nursing instructors and faculty members with preceptors in the process of education and clinical evaluation of students; participatory selection of preceptors and their continuous training during the process.

The findings revealed that the preceptorship model could be an interactive process between the nursing schools and hospitals. The nursing students, preceptors, nursing instructors, clinical faculty members, hospital managers, and other health workers took part in this process.