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Preceptors

Dear Preceptor,

You make a difference and we value your expertise! Please know how truly thankful each intern is for the supervised experience that you provide. Our ultimate goal is for preceptors and sites, like yourself, to gain from this internship: increase job satisfaction within your staff from being able to share their expertise; gain some new perspective that fresh eyes can provide; gain an intern to work on projects, do in-services, staff relief under a supervising dietitian (they can see patients provided an RD co-signs their notes); as well as cultivate trained, highly qualified dietitians in our area for future job openings.

A thorough explanation of the program is provided in the main page and general information section of this website. The program accepts 8 full time interns per year. The internship begins and ends in August. We try to have interns complete their food service rotation in the fall to allow for time to train them in medical nutrition therapy. Interns have class time on Mondays and spend Tuesday through Friday in their rotations. Interns can work weekends and holidays if the site needs them. The elective rotation time varies depending on their schedule. The classes that the interns attend on Monday cover clinical nutrition, foodservice, community nutrition, research and public policy, and multiple guest lectures from field experts.

The Dietetic Internship Program Management team looks forward to working with you to improve our future profession.

Benefits of Providing Supervised Practice Experiences for Dietetic Interns:

  1. Students can perform certain tasks for you such as develop materials, conduct in-services or quality improvement, which you may be having difficulty completing during your usual schedule.
  2. Students can help give better supervision of employees. They can act as an extension of the dietitian rather than as someone else to supervise.
  3. Students can help define what you do and how you do it. Students question and your explanations often result in clearer ways of doing things.
  4. Students can solve problems creatively (e.g. assign students to a particular problem that they will research and resolve.)
  5. Students increase your learning since they bring new knowledge and perspectives to your institution.
  6. Students can assist with journal clubs to help update staff on the latest information in dietetic practice
  7. Students can help employee morale. Staff members selected to play a role in teaching students will feel more important and valued, which often improves staff retention.
  8. Students break the routine of day-to-day practice and challenge the preceptor.
  9. Students are scheduled to do staff relief under the supervision of the dietitian as they become more competent to help provide additional patient/ client care/ services.

Role of a Preceptor and Supervised Practice Site

  1. Maintain a collegial relationship with the student intern.
  2. Supervise the practice experience of a student intern.
    • Establish an affiliation agreement between CSUS and your agency.
    • Serve as contact between internship director and agency.
    • Coordinate placing and scheduling interns at your site.
    • Inform internship director of any problems with intern to get corrected.
    • Provide relevant resources needed by intern at site.
    • Review objectives and practice requirement established at your site.
    • Provide timely feedback to intern and written evaluations (mid and final).
    • Provide "real" work situations for interns. Many reports projects and activities are wonderful learning experiences for interns.
    • Make suggestions for program improvement.
    • Realize interns cannot replace employees, except for scheduled staff relief.
  3. Establish a learning contract with the intern

Interns have the primary responsibility for addressing the educational objectives. If you find an intern is not "up to speed” on a topic or area you can set up a learning contract requiring them to do “remedial” work on their own to get back “up to speed”. You should always inform the internship program manager if an intern needs additional training. Your job is not to teach them but provide an environment to apply their knowledge and provide them feedback for improvement and experiences to become competent at the entry level.