A Look at Preceptor Challenges within Organizations: The Case for Medical Laboratory Scientists

The clinical phase of health professions programs encounters certain challenges that need to be dealt with to achieve desired competencies. It is beneficial to both students and clinical educators, or preceptors, when these challenges are identified and addressed. A 48-question survey was deployed by the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) to thousands of clinical educators in the laboratory professions over a 6-week period. The response rate was 6.33% (n=207). Respondents included medical laboratory scientists (43%), medical laboratory technicians (8.2%), phlebotomists (21.7%), clinical laboratory assistants (0.5%) and other laboratory professionals (26.6%) including blood bank specialist, lab manager, blood bank manager, supervisor, etc. This paper reviews two survey questions, a multi-select question and an open-ended question, that are aimed at assessing challenges preceptors face while training students. The multi-select question consisted of a list of potential limitations (time, resources, compensation, staffing, other). Results from the multi-select question indicated that nearly 7.7% (16/207) of respondents have no limitations to training students at their facilities; however, 57% (118/207) indicated staffing issues, 56% (116/207) indicated time constraints, 35.3% (73/207) noted resource limitations, 25.1% (52/207) reported lack of compensation, and 7.2% (15/207) selected "other" limitations. The open-ended question asked what challenges they encountered as clinical educators and was analyzed by thematic analysis. Emergent themes included time (23.7%, 49/207), student engagement (13.5%, 28/207), staffing issues (6.8%, 14/207) and resources (2.9%, 6/207). Collectively, the synthesis of these two questions indicate that the most pressing challenges revolve around constraints in time, inadequate staffing, challenges in effectively engaging and maintaining student motivation, and sustaining focus essential for the successful acquisition of expertise required for laboratory professionals. By identifying the major challenges experienced by clinical educators, this research also reveals the areas where clinical educators need health care administrative support and academic support from faculty.