Patricia Sawyer Benner
Patricia Sawyer Benner was born on August 31, 1942, and she is a renowned nursing author, theorist, and academic. Benner decided to be a nurse while she was working at a hospital admitting department while in college. In 1964, she studied nursing and earned a Bachelor of Arts from Pasadena College (Quinn, 2020). In 1970 at San Francisco, the University of California awarded Benner a Master of Science in Medical-Surgical Nursing. She was awarded a PhD in 1982 at the University of California in Berkeley. Dr Benner has contributed significantly towards the field in nursing as she has been actively involved in field research and developed nursing theories. Dr. Benner actively participated in the nursing field in the late 1960s that included being a head nurse at Kansas City General Hospital Coronary Care Unit, and she also worked at Stanford University Hospital and Medical Center as nursing staff in intensive care. In the years between 1970 and 1975, while at the University of California Nursing School, she became a research associate.
Dr. Benner became actively involved in nursing research work, which added more to her nursing experiences as she became a research assistant for Richard S. Lazarus at the University of California. In the early 1980s, in San Francisco Consortium, she became a project director for a project that was concerned with achieving styles of intraprofessional assessment, consensus, and evaluation. Dr. Patricia Benner has continued working at the University of California since 1982, and she received the “15th Helen Nahm Research Lecture Award” from the UCSF Nursing School. Dr. Patricia Benner currently works in the Psychological Department of the UCSF Nursing School as a professor emerita (Davis & Maisano, 2016). She teaches ethics, nursing science philosophy, and the interpretive phenomenology. Most of her research has been based on clinical judgment and skill acquisition in the nursing practice. Dr Benner has written and published several articles and books like The Primacy of Caring and Nursing Pathways for Patient Safety. The primary theory and philosophy that Benner is mostly known for is her book on “Novice to Expert.”
Nurses graduate every year from various nursing programs and acquire jobs in clinical settings. Benner believes that new nurses become seasoned mentors and nurses to the next generation after gaining more knowledge and insights throughout their nursing careers. She denotes the nursing practice to be filled with complex responsibilities that would become easier as a nurse continues to develop their careers over a long period. Her novice model to expert has been adopted in clinical practice and used to raise the retention of nurses and aids in building the experiences of new nursing administrators and managers (Marriner-Tomey & Alligood, 1998). Dr. Patricia Benner introduced the Novice to Expert model to nursing in 1982, where she discusses how nursing understanding and skills for patient care are developed over time. The model borrows from the “Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition,” which she manipulated to fit the nursing practice. Her model discusses how new nurses start in the novice stage as they continue to gain more knowledge and skills through several stages and eventually become experts in nursing.
Through the theory, Benner maintains that nursing skills undergo development through a combination of personal experiences and a firm educational foundation. She further added that nurses could develop their skills further without learning a theory (Davis & Maisano, 2016). The theory establishes five levels of developing a nursing experience that are namely novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert. The novice nurse is a beginner having no experience. Nurses just beginning operate under governed behavior as they are taught rules that guide their performance, and hence they are inflexible and limited to specific and less critical clinical activities. The advanced beginner displays acceptable performance as he or she has prior experience. The advanced beginner has experienced real situations and can identify a recurrent component. However, the advanced beginners still need support in setting priorities and therefore require guidance from a mentor.
The competent stage shows how the nurse can individually set priorities by applying past experiences and usually has been in the nursing practice for at least two years. The nurse acquires conscious and deliberate planning that aids in organizing tasks. However, the nurse lacks flexibility and multi-tasking abilities (Quinn, 2020). The proficient stage entails a nurse leader who has a holistic nursing understanding that improves their decision-making abilities but is still guided by maxims. They certainly learn from experience on what to expect in various situations and modify the plans. The expert stage displays extensive knowledge of the nurse who can intervene in complex cases. The nurse no longer relies on guidelines, maxims, and rules. The model presents a transformative kind of leadership that may be what Dr Benner is encouraging.
In conclusion, the novice to expert theory displays the methods through which graduate nurses can grow and develop their clinical nursing skills, knowledge, and understanding. The model has been used in leadership and developing mentorship programs to provide teaching aids and raise nurse retention. Dr Patricia Benner leadership style can be described as a transformational leadership style where the nurse leaders participate actively in teams before they acquire full range knowledge and expertise in executing change and best clinical practices. She advices new graduates to try to follow the hospital hierarchy if they intend to initiate improvement. The nurses should focus on what they can change at their levels and keep a list of the recommended changes until they understand the nursing profession and not fight every battle.