1. Apply
Ten minutes on the form: credential, population, state, hours a week, mode, and a line about your practice. A coordinator replies within one business day with what is open for that profile or what needs fixing first.
2. Verify once
You upload a CV, your license, your certification and a short practice description. The license is checked on the state board and the certification with the board that issued it. Those four documents then serve every program you are approved by.
3. Agreement
Programs place students only under an affiliation agreement with the practice. If yours already holds one, it is confirmed; if not, one is drafted in the school's own template and sent to whoever signs for your practice. One to two weeks, on the program's clock.
4. Orientation
Ninety minutes, by video, on your own time before the first student: the log the student keeps, the two evaluations you sign, how to hand a student a patient without losing the hour, and two teaching methods that fit a full clinic. Not accredited CE.
5. A card, and your answer
One rotation described in six fields: program, course, dates, hours, population and the mode the program permits, plus the student's own note. You have 72 hours to say yes or no. Saying yes releases names both ways.
6. The rotation and the two deposits
The student arrives having read your onboarding list. You teach, they log, you sign the midpoint evaluation and the first half is deposited. You sign the final and the second half follows. A named coordinator is on the rotation throughout.
Where the time goes
Almost all of the three weeks is the agreement. A program's placement office confirms your documents against its handbook and signs with your practice on its own schedule. Preceptors whose practice already holds an agreement with a program are approved in days; those at large health systems, where a legal office reads every agreement, should expect the longer end.
After that the academic calendar rules. Rotations start in January, May and August, so a nurse approved in October may wait until the new year for a card while one approved in April sees several.