A learning partnership: Exploring preceptorship through interviews with registered and novice nurses

Abstract

Novice nurses encounter numerous factors that impact on their learning in the complex healthcare workplace. Registered nurses often work one-on-one with novices as preceptors to facilitate the development of novices’ clinical skills and socialisation into the profession. This paper explores the concept of preceptorship from novice nurses’ and preceptors’ perspective, drawing upon data from a project between a large healthcare organisation and a university in Melbourne, Australia. The study, framed in ethnomethodology, included fieldwork observation, interviews and student surveys; this paper focuses on data collected over a series of individual interviews with nursing students (n = 28) and p..