Preparing for the real world: Clinical facilitators and nursing student clinical placements

Clinical Facilitators are the proverbial bridge between the student nurse and their placements in the clinical setting. These key nursing educators have a multi-faceted role of mentoring, monitoring, evaluating and supporting students in what can be an intimidating, face-paced setting. Without the Clinical Facilitator’s full oversight over the student nurse there would be no safe way to give these students real life experience within the clinical setting, thus greatly limiting their knowledge translation from classroom to practice. The role of a nurse Clinical Facilitator (CF) is to facilitate the translation of previously learned theoretical knowledge into competency level clinical practice skills for undergraduate nursing students. This process continues sequentially over several clinical placements of increasing complexity until competence in all clinical practice skills is achieved for registration as a Registered Nurse.