CPNW clearance: the gate before your Gonzaga hours count

What CPNW is, and where Gonzaga fits in it

Clinical Placements Northwest is a nonprofit covering Washington State and Northern Idaho. It describes its membership as 53 organizations: 19 healthcare partners and 33 partners in education. For a student, it works as the shared hub between member schools and member hospitals, the place where your clinical clearance is recorded so a partner site can see that you are ready to be on a unit.

Gonzaga University appears on CPNW's list of participating programs with three entries: Nursing-BSN, Nursing-MSN and the Doctor of Anesthesia Practice. Gonzaga's own documents write only the acronym and never spell it out, which is why many graduate students first meet CPNW as a single line in a packet or syllabus rather than as a named step in their plan. Treat it as a named step. It sits on the critical path to your first counted hour.

Health systems on CPNW's partner list

CPNW's current healthcare-partner list is where most Spokane and Puget Sound clearance begins. If your preceptor practices inside one of these organizations, expect CPNW requirements to run alongside the system's own onboarding forms.

• Providence: Sacred Heart, Holy Family, Mount Carmel, St. Joseph, Providence Medical Group East and Southwest, Everett, St. Peter, Centralia and St. Luke's Rehab
• Swedish: all campuses and Swedish Medical Group
• EvergreenHealth, Overlake, Valley Medical Center (UW Medicine), Seattle Children's and Fred Hutch
• VA Puget Sound (Seattle and American Lake), VA Spokane and Madigan
• Eastern State and Western State hospitals, Olympic Heritage Behavioral Health, Northwest Specialty Hospital and Odessa Memorial

Two regional systems sit outside that pattern. MultiCare's 2019 student page sent students to CPNW for onboarding, yet MultiCare is missing from CPNW's current partner list, so confirm its present route before you plan around it. Kootenai Health in Coeur d'Alene runs its own internal onboarding instead of a third-party portal.

When your site is outside CPNW's region

CPNW covers Washington and Northern Idaho, while Gonzaga admits NP students from ten western states, and systems elsewhere run their own routes. In Oregon, OHSU describes ACEMAPP for placements but says MSN or APRN placement students are not required to use it, and Providence Oregon sends nurse practitioner rotations through its graduate medical education office, with a request due at least four weeks ahead. St. Luke's in Boise uses myClinicalExchange and asks advanced practice students to apply before any rotation request.

Gonzaga's packet names CPNW without listing exceptions for other states. If your site is in Oregon, southern Idaho, California or another admitting state, ask the Clinical Placement Team how the CPNW condition is met for you before the semester starts. The ten-state rule explains why your practicum sits in the state where you hold your license.

Why Gonzaga students start their CPNW clock with us

Clearance moves fastest when the preceptor and site are known early, and that is exactly where our placement desk works. The moment we match you with a preceptor, we tell you whether the site is a CPNW partner, which onboarding route it uses and how many weeks of lead time it expects, so your compliance work starts the same week as the match rather than the week before the term.

We also build the preceptor half of your Practicum Site Placement Request, with license and certification details, the people to reach at the site and for the agreement, proposed dates and a note on how the placement fits your course. The approval itself belongs to Gonzaga's faculty; what we control is that nothing in the request sends it back for another round. See how it works or use the form below.