NURS 5624 Advanced Health Assessment: securing your first FNP preceptor

What NURS 5624 is and where it sits

NURS 5624 is a six-credit course carrying 90 of the FNP program's 630 clinical hours. It is the prerequisite for NURS 5644, which unlocks NURS 5645, which in turn opens the capstone, NURS 5746. Until this course is passed, the rest of the clinical chain stays closed.

The catalog title names the clinic work plainly: complete histories, advanced physical exams, and reasoning from what you find to a short list of likely diagnoses. Because TAMUCC's guides treat it as the early clinical experience, your preceptor is teaching you how an NP visit flows as much as what to conclude from it. Students in the FNP Post-Master's Certificate take this same course.

The semester you take it in comes from your Degree Planner, which is not posted publicly. The order of all four courses, and the handbook's once-a-year teaching pattern, are laid out on your first clinical course.

How to find a NURS 5624 preceptor

1. Start with clinicians who know your workIn TAMUCC's own guide, personal networks are described as the way most FNP students land a preceptor. List the NPs and physicians you have worked beside, then check which of them see patients in outpatient family or primary care.
2. Search Typhon for sites past students usedTyphon lets you look up clinical sites and preceptors earlier TAMUCC students worked with, and its Clinical Site Directory shows whether the university's contract with a site is current. The site directory guide shows how to read those dates.
3. Ask in person, with your CV and the objectivesWhen nobody in your network can take you, TAMUCC's guide suggests a face-to-face meeting. Bring your CV and the NURS 5624 course objectives so the clinician can see what 90 hours of assessment-focused precepting asks of them.
4. Verify the license and the agreementCheck the clinician's license on the Texas Board of Nursing look-up for NPs or the Texas Medical Board's for physicians. A site lacking a current affiliation agreement needs one signed before your first hour, a process TAMUCC says can take as long as three months.
5. Send the Preceptor Agreement PacketEach preceptor signs a new DocuSign packet every semester, attaching a CV and a license copy no older than 30 days. The packet guide covers the Canvas upload that follows.

What counts, and how this course feeds the 75-hour minimums

TAMUCC counts only the time you spend actively engaged in patient care. That covers the visit itself, working through the case with your preceptor, and documenting in the electronic health record. Lunch, and any stretch spent outside the clinic, is excluded. Every patient you see goes into Typhon as an encounter.

TAMUCC also sets three population minimums for the whole program: pediatrics, women's health and geriatrics. For each, you need either 75 clinical hours or 150 encounters documented in Typhon, and TAMUCC's working assumption is roughly two patients per hour. Encounters from earlier courses count toward those dedicated rotations, so the children, women's health visits and older adults you see during NURS 5624 begin building toward the minimums months before the pediatric and women's health courses start.

Log each encounter carefully from the first day so the population totals are accurate later. How the three minimums sit inside the 630 hours is set out on the 630-hour page.