This is illegal, right? (FNP preceptor issue)
Hi everyone!
I’m a FNP student in my first clinical rotation. For one, I had to pay for this rotation thru NPHub, and I live in a major city so….it was not cheap.
I really liked my preceptor the first couple of shifts. However, the last 1-2 shifts there’s been a change in the energy a bit. It’s not just me, it seems like she has an attitude with all of her staff, so I don’t think it’s related to my work… I feel pretty confident with my training thus far, although…she’s not exactly teaching me much anymore? I’ve done 4 shifts so far. I’m basically already operating on my own, and then going to her for confirmation of what I think I should order. I don’t feel like I’m being taught much. She has her own practice, so it’s just her and sometimes another NP is there, but that’s it. She’s basically catching up on other work while I see the patients. So I’m essentially paying HER to act as her employee…great, right?!
She gets very irritated when I ask questions that are in this 20-page packet that she gave me. She doesn’t have any MAs or phlebotomists or anything at all, just front desk staff so I’m also doing all my own vitals and labs. I’ve never had to spin the blood tubes before, etc…but again, it’s in the packet I guess lol. But I’m sorry, the amount of time it’s going to take me to flip through these 20 pages to figure this out is just wasting time when you can give me a 2-second yes or no answer. The way she spoke to me last shift though was overall really off- putting. She treated me like I was an idiot when I wanted to confirm with her about what I needed to do with some blood tubes. Then I was letting her know that I wasn’t familiar with the EMR software she uses and that it’s a little hard to navigate sometimes (obviously with the point of, I’ll just need to get used to it), and she goes, “it’s actually not that hard.” Like ok, lol. There were other comments but that’s the general vibe.
So last shift she tells me that she’s not going to be there one of the days in the upcoming week because she has to testify in some court case (not healthcare related I don’t think, but still wtf lol), and she goes “you’re still gonna be here seeing my patients though”. I kind of laughed and said ok because I didn’t know how else to react in the moment.
I thought about it when I got home, and obviously there are multiple ethical issues here…for one, I’d basically be operating without a license. And also, I think it’s not fair that clearly she’s going to be charging these patients as if she’s the one seeing them, when she’s not even on site. Not only was she not going to be on site, but clearly unreachable since she’s gonna be in court…lol.
I ended up not going to clinical this past week because I was really sick, but I’ll be back this week. So this date has passed already thankfully since I was sick. I don’t want to jeopardize my hours, but I feel like I should make it clear that I’m not comfortable seeing patients when she isn’t there.
Am I crazy, is this normal?! Should I say something now, or wait to see if she tries to put me in that situation again? I also don’t want to come across as accusatory, I’m pretty sure she’s not going to react well at all to that, clearly! 😬 thanks for reading!