Finding a mentor and a practice experience site in Oklahoma

Excelsior states plainly that no clinical instruction is provided in any School of Nursing program. As a task list, that means you owe the university a mentor faculty can approve, an agency willing to host you and sign paperwork, and a project that agency actually wants done. The useful part is that this is indirect care work, so the field runs well past hospital units, into classrooms, informatics teams, county health offices, and quality departments.

What is on you, not on the university

• A mentor you nominate. Faculty approves your nominee, it never assigns one. Start at find a mentor.
• A site with someone authorized to sign an affiliation agreement with Excelsior.
• A project scoped so the site gets something useful out of your hours. See capstone project.
• Compliance, cleared through CastleBranch plus whatever the site adds.

Excelsior wants a master's prepared person with real expertise in your specialization. Some students call that person a preceptor, because it is the word the rest of nursing uses, but Excelsior's term is mentor. The role is voluntary and unpaid, and faculty approves whoever you bring forward. See mentor vs preceptor.

For nursing education, start with professional development and clinical education departments inside INTEGRIS Health in Oklahoma City, Saint Francis Health System in Tulsa, OU Health, Ascension St. John, and Mercy. Nursing faculty are the other pool: the University of Oklahoma College of Nursing teaches at sites in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Lawton, Duncan, and Norman, and Oklahoma City University's Kramer School of Nursing, the University of Tulsa, and the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond all carry faculty who qualify.

For nursing informatics, Oklahoma has an asset many states lack. MyHealth Access Network, the nonprofit health information exchange designated as the state's exchange entity, connects thousands of providers and employs people doing interoperability work daily. Clinical informatics teams inside the hospital systems are the other route, and the Oklahoma State Department of Health runs public data programs such as OK2SHARE.

For nursing leadership, think nurse managers, directors, quality and accreditation staff, and public health leadership. The Tulsa Health Department and the Oklahoma City-County Health Department both run programs a leadership project can attach to, and the tribal health systems are a large and often overlooked option, including Cherokee Nation Health Services around Tahlequah, the Chickasaw Nation in Ada, and Choctaw Nation facilities in the southeast. Outside the metros, in Stillwater, Enid, Muskogee, or Ardmore, you have fewer choices and far less competition.

Each MS capstone carries 135 practice experience hours, roughly ten to twelve hours a week across a standard term. Most working Oklahoma nurses cover that with two evenings and part of a weekend, or one fixed half day if a manager is flexible. RN-to-BS students carry about 90 hours across two 45 hour courses, covered at RN-to-BS practice experience.

A practice experience is not a clinical rotation and it is not direct patient care. The hours go toward building something: a teaching module, a workflow analysis, a dashboard, a policy revision, an onboarding redesign. Document as you go, because reconstructing a log in week eleven is miserable and mentors do not enjoy signing off on estimates. Practice experience hours covers logging, and how the two differ is worth sending to a manager who pushes back.

• Oklahoma Board of Nursing
• Oklahoma Board of Nursing, Nurse Licensure Compact
• Oklahoma Board of Nursing license verification
• Nurse Licensure Compact
• Oklahoma State Department of Health
• MyHealth Access Network
• Excelsior University nursing programs