Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) Handbook

Time documented as clinical hours must be time spent in direct patient care activities.

The requirements for clinical sites and hours are detailed by the National Task Force on Quality Nurse Practitioner Education (NTF). Per Standard III of the NTF criteria, “Direct Patient Care Clinical Hours” refers to hours in which direct clinical care is provided to patients.

Clinical experiences and time spent in each experience should be varied and distributed in a way that prepares you to provide care to the populations served. All clinical experience activities must be completed under the direct supervision of your preceptor.

You may count the hours spent in “grand rounds” or other patient-focused medical education activities that occur on the assigned unit, for no more than 5% of your total hours for the clinical rotation.

All clinical hours must be supervised by your approved preceptor during the academic term in which you are registered for the clinical course. Your clinical hour logs must accurately reflect each date, time, and hours you were present at your approved clinical site and engaged in direct patient care activities under the supervision of your approved preceptor. Any instance of fabricated information in your hours or field encounter logs can result in disciplinary action under the university’s code of student conduct.

If you are in a Primary Care or Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner program, you may include time spent in on-site patient care and telehealth hours (when appropriate for the course/program). You may complete no more than 50% of the total clinical hours required for your program in telehealth.

When completing telehealth hours, you must hold an active, unencumbered RN license in the state where the site and preceptor are based.

Lunch (whether spent in the office or out) and travel time to, from, or between sites (if traveling from one site to another). For clinical days of 8–9 hours, a minimum of one 30-minute break is highly recommended. If you are not able to take lunch, please note in the clinical log the reason for not taking one.

Any “rounding up” of clinical hours (i.e., counting 3.5 hours as 4) will be considered academic dishonesty and may result in failure of the course and possible dismissal from the program.

You are required to document all patient encounters in the Field Encounters section of the clinical management system. This documentation must include information such as age, ethnicity, a SOAP note, and billing/coding details. You must ensure that your logs do not contain any personally identifiable information.

The minimum number of required field encounters is specified on each specific program's page. While these are the minimum requirements, you must log information for every patient you encounter during your clinical rotation, even if the total patients you saw exceeds the minimum. For example, if you see 200 patients but the course requires only 160, you must log all 200 encounters.

By logging all patient encounters, you demonstrate compliance with documentation standards and ensure that you have complete records for legal purposes.

Psychiatric Mental Health NP - Group Encounter Logs

If you are in the Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner program, you may have the opportunity to participate in group sessions at your clinical site. A group session is equal to one field encounter. When logging this field encounter in the clinical management system, choose the option to mark it as a group session and then note how many patients were present.

You must have at least one final clinical evaluation per clinical course completed by your preceptor(s). If you log 40+ clinical hours with a preceptor, their evaluation is required. If under 40 hours is completed with a preceptor, that preceptor's evaluation is optional. To pass the clinical course, you must achieve 3.0 or above on all assessed items in every final preceptor evaluation. All completed preceptor evaluations contribute to the final grade in the clinical course. If any final preceptor evaluation shows an unsatisfactory score on any assessed item, you will not pass the clinical and must retake the course.

The grade of “B” is the minimum acceptable grade for graduate nurse practitioner clinical courses. If you do not earn the required grade in a clinical course and must repeat the class, you must repeat all required clinical hours and field encounters. You must also have a passing preceptor evaluation from your course repeat. If repeating a clinical course, please work with your Clinical Student Manager to submit a site and preceptor to be approved for the repeated course/rotation.