Preceptorship: a review of the literature

Preceptorship is an important part of the United Kingdom Central Council for Nursing's (UKCC) post-registration and practice recommendations. Therefore, there is a great need for educationalists and clinical practitioners to explore the issues surrounding preceptorship and come to informed decisions on how they intend to implement preceptor programmes. There is a need to identify existing knowledge and its application to practice based on the commonly occurring themes within the theoretical and empirical literature. This paper reviews the current literature addressing these themes of role definition, preceptor selection, preceptorship programmes, the preceptorship experience and the limitations of preceptorship in clinical practice.