Recognizing and Rewarding Preceptors: Do You Bother? A Survey

In one of my other professional lives—as a consultant in nursing staff development and competency appraisal — I frequently receive inquiries from nurse educators and human resource development staff related to preceptorship programs and preceptor development. In the past, most of these questions pertained to how programs could be designed to prepare nurses to function in the preceptor role. Some years ago, as many nurses educators found themselves responsible for developing not only nursing staff, but all staff throughout their healthcare facility, more questions arose on how to design comparable, preceptor-type training programs for staff who are not nurses. Now that the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses has responded to these needs by producing all of the basic teaching products necessary to provide this instruction to nurses^1–,4 as well as to other healthcare staff,^5–,7 the nature of these inquiries has shifted yet again to...