Please consider maintaining the 120 hours of precepfing for 5 contact hours provision as acceptable confinuing
educafion rather than changing it to 120 hours of precepfing for 1 contact hour. This provision has been helpful
in recruifing and rewarding much-needed preceptors for new nurses as well as students. There is great demand
for willing, qualified nursing preceptors in our healthcare organizafions to mentor and train new nurses. Many
organizafions are not able to pay preceptors a premium to serve in this role, which is demanding and necessary
to ensure a supply of highly qualified nurses successfully enter the workforce and transifion into
pracfice. Allowing nurses to precept in a 1:1 relafionship to claim 5 hours of confinuing educafion credit for 120
hours of precepfing provides some recognifion of the value of this role. Changing this from 5 hours to 1 hour
per 120 hours of precepfing is a take-away and hardly makes it worth using this toward confinuing educafion,
essenfially devaluing the contribufions of preceptors. 120 hours of a preceptor relafionship is preꢀy typical of
working with 1-2 students per semester.
When this rule was added a few years ago during my tenure as the MIBON Chair and Rules Commiꢀee Chair, it
was based loosely on the Kentucky Board of Nursing’s confinuing educafion requirements (even used some of
the KY language verbafim in wrifing the rule). In Kentucky, nurses must complete 14 confinuing educafion hours
annually, and are allowed to use 120 hours of precepfing to safisfy this requirement for the full 14 hours each
year.
I would urge you to either maintain the status quo and clarify that 120 hours of precepfing is worth 5 contact
hours per cycle if there is confusion on this point, or even consider increasing this for a total of 10 or even 15
hours per licensing cycle (which is sfill significantly less than KY=28 hrs/2 yrs). Many of our preceptors are
precepfing constantly throughout the year, and would benefit from this, as well as encourage more nurses to
precept. Preceptors working with students or new employees are much needed, work hard, and must stay up to
date on best pracfices for their department or specialty area to be able to mentor and teach
others. Maintaining this level of experfise requires ongoing educafion and familiarity with best pracfices to be
able to effecfively serve in this role and properly train and mentor other nurses and students. Preceptors are
oꢁen our highest performing and most professionally developed nurses. They are essenfial to maintaining and
expanding the pipeline of qualified nurses needed to combat the nursing shortage.
Kentucky Board of Nursing references:
hꢀps://kbn.ky.gov/educafion/Pages/Confinuing-Educafion-Competency.aspx
hꢀps://kbn.ky.gov/KBN%20Documents/ce-preceptor-verificafion-form.pdf
4. Similar to preceptors, there is a significant nursing faculty shortage. I would encourage you to consider allowing
nursing clinical instructors that are directly supervising and training nursing students in clinical seꢂngs to claim
some of their fime spent teaching toward their 25 contact hour relicensure requirement in a future rule set
revision. Similar arguments could be made regarding the level of clinical experfise needed by instructors to
maintain competency in teaching nursing students in the clinical seꢂng.
Thank you for your considerafion of my comments and suggesfions, and for your service in protecfion of the public.
Joshua Meringa, MPA, MHA, MBA, BSN, RN, NPD-BC
Nurse Educator & Academic Liaison
Nursing Practice & Development
Corewell Health West
616.391.1528 Direct
616.301.4663 Cell
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