How does your program verify clinical hrs?

loriangel14, RN · Apr 17, 2014

My preceptor signed off on all of my hours.

TheDude77 · Apr 17, 2014

I got some answers from my school. We use Typhon as well but am still not sure what EXACTLY counts towards hours.

Palliative Care, DNP · Apr 18, 2014

We use Typhon and at the end have to print logged hours and have the preceptor sign saying we completed those hours.

PG2018 · Apr 18, 2014

I had to get a form signed AND notarized by my employer verifying that I had 2,000 hours of full-time employment. I got the sheet signed and notarized, and the next day I turned in my two weeks notice, lol. Yeah, the hospital wasn't my cup of tea.

Well, nevermind. I was thinking this thread was about clinical hours required for entry into the specialty courses/clinicals of a NP program. Oops!

mtsteelhorse · Apr 18, 2014

ella86RN, I'll try to learn more about this concern. :cat:

TheDude77 · Apr 18, 2014

ella86RN, I'll try to learn more about this concern.

Yes! I would like to know! I do know that they are a little more lenient since preceptors are hard to come by in psych program. They are allowing us to follow md's as well as np's.

PG2018 · Apr 18, 2014

Yes! I would like to know! I do know that they are a little more lenient since preceptors are hard to come by in psych program. They are allowing us to follow md's as well as np's.

My program requires us to log what equates to 15 hour increments with a kind of review documenting what we did/learned, etc. It's time consuming to say the least and often difficult to reflect immediately and come up with something you learned. In life, I find I don't realize I've generally learned something, experiential in nature, until some time down the road.

laurabaker · Apr 18, 2014

Our program uses Medatrax. We have to log our hours in on a daily basis, plus enter all our clinical information. Each week our preceptor has to sign a clinical log with our hours for the week. We then email this to our professor at designated times. It works very smooth I think.

cjcalimer · Apr 19, 2014

My school also uses Typhon. We have to submit a calendar at the beginning of the semester and we have a site visit with our clinical faculty. I guess technically they could stop by any day we're there (we're supposed to notify them immeadiately of any changes, illness, etc.) but in reality they don't. My program said we could count all time at our clinical site when patients were scheduled. So you couldn't show up an hour early and look through charts and count it. You can't count your lunch, meetings, drug rep presentations, etc. They also tell us we should be seeing at least one patient an hour. Right now, I'm with a visiting doctor service, so depending on the day and the amount of driving and if someone got unexpectedly admitted to the hospital, I don't always get that but it's fine. Even though we're in the car driving a lot of the day I'm still charting, calling patients and pharmacies and nurses, checking labs, etc. I'm sure your experience will be similar. There's always an issue to be dealt with. Those are every bit of a learning experience and part of patient care and what's we'll do as NPs.

Dixiecup · Apr 29, 2014

Most of my clinicals were in very rural areas. Some days we would see 25 pts, other days 3! I still got to claim eight hours of clinical time if I was there eight hours. I had one instructor actually acuse me of forging my preceptors signature! My preceptor was a physician at the time and he was red hot mad when I told him! He wrote a personal letter to my instructor telling her what a pleasure I was to work with and what a wonderful NP I was going to be!

zmansc, ASN, RN · Apr 29, 2014

Dixiecup - Did you also have to have a certain number of patient contacts? My school requires both a certain number of hours and a certain number of patient contacts in a variety of categories. It would take alot of effort in an almost ideal situation to get all the contacts in the minimum number of hours, so hours really is far less important to me than getting the contacts. There also is no maximum number of contacts in each category, so in theory you could go ahead and get many, many, extra hours and contacts if you wanted.

jessica.lanelle · May 2, 2014

We use Typhon, as well. My hours so far have all been at an urgent care, so I have not had to worry about logging lunch breaks or anything. I log the actual time I was @ the facility, and them I also log the actual time I was in the room with the pt, and the time I consulted with my preceptor about the pt. The two figures don't exactly match up, but they are close enough :)