BSN community field experience placement across Florida

It helps to be clear about who actually needs a preceptor, because the answer decides whether you need us. Prelicensure programs generally arrange clinical rotations for their students. RN-to-BSN programs generally ask you to find your own community field experience.

• RN-to-BSN students, already licensed and often working, who self-source a community or population-health field experience and a preceptor to sign the hours.
• The smaller group of accelerated or hybrid prelicensure students whose program asks them to help find a local site.

We serve mostly that first group. Send your program and we will tell you whether a placement is even required, and our RN-to-BSN field experience page walks through the rest.

A BSN community field experience is built around population health rather than acute bedside care, so the settings are public-health and community organizations.

• The Florida Department of Health runs a county health department in all 67 counties, which host immunization, communicable-disease, and maternal and child programs and take on student experiences.
• Community health centers and safety-net clinics that serve underserved communities statewide.
• School and college health, occupational and employee-health programs, and home health and hospice agencies.
• Care-coordination and population-health teams inside the state's large hospital systems and nonprofits.

A county health department in every county is rare among the states, and it gives Florida students a dependable public-health anchor almost anywhere they live.

Florida is large and uneven, so where you live changes how quickly a site comes together.

• The southeast around Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach, and the Gulf metros of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota, carry the deepest bench of community and population-health sites.
• Central Florida around Orlando, the northeast around Jacksonville, and the capital region of Tallahassee add strong coverage.
• The rural interior and parts of the Panhandle have fewer sites, so we start earlier and widen the search when a county is thin.

When your county is short on a given setting, we look to the county health department or a neighboring community before the term slips.

Florida's population makes for rich community and public-health work, which is exactly what an RN-to-BSN capstone is meant to capture.

• A large older-adult population keeps home health, hospice, chronic-disease, and care-coordination programs active across the state.
• Between roughly 150,000 and 200,000 migrant and seasonal farmworkers and their families move through Florida each year, and the health department's programs for them offer real population-health experiences.
• The state's community health worker programs and its maternal-child and immunization services round out the options.

These are the settings where a community field experience feels like real public-health nursing rather than a box to check.

Your Florida preceptor does not have to be a physician or a graduate-level specialist. For a community or population-health experience the right person is usually an experienced nurse or an appropriate professional in the setting.

• An experienced BSN-prepared registered nurse, such as a public-health nurse or a nurse inside a community program.
• A community-program supervisor, a school or occupational-health nurse, or a nurse in a population-health role.

Your program has the final say on who qualifies and how hours are recorded, so we match the fit to your school's rules first.

Most RN-to-BSN students are already licensed and working, so licensure comes first. Florida joined the Nurse Licensure Compact in 2018, so a multistate license carries across compact lines.

• If Florida is your primary state of residence, a Florida multistate license covers you here and in other compact states.
• If you live in another compact state but complete your field experience in Florida, your home multistate license generally travels with you, subject to your program's and site's paperwork.

Compact and licensure rules change, so confirm your own status with the Florida Board of Nursing.

There is no national required clinical-hour number for the BSN. The 2021 education standards are competency-based, and each program sets its own community field-experience total, commonly in the rough range of 30 to 120 hours. Confirm your figure with your program and see our BSN clinical hours guide.

• Tell us your program, your required hours, and your county, and we scope realistic public-health and community sites.
• We approach a preceptor, confirm the role and license fit, and hand your program a packet to approve.
• Nothing is billed until a match is confirmed and your school signs off. See how it works and cost.

When you are ready, request a preceptor at the match form and we reply within one business day. We assist with sourcing and coordination, and we never guarantee placement or your program's approval.