THE THEORIST: Who is PATRICIA BENNER?

Patricia Benner (R.N., Ph.D., F.A.A.N, F.R.C.N.)

Patricia Benner was born as Patricia Sawyer to parents Shirley and Clint Sawyer on the 31st day

August in 1942 in Hampton, Virginia. She had two other sisters and was the middle child in the

family. When the girls were in high school, her family moved to the state of California, where

they graduated. Later, her parents got divorced she went to college. She became particularly

interested in nursing when she had the chance to work as an admitting clerk at a local hospital in Pasadena California.She later got married to Richard Benner in August 1967 at the time when she was still in finishing her college degree. She bore two children: a son in 1973 and a daughter in 1981. Her husband majored in situation leadership and the two of them worked together in developing

clinical models. They have also travelled together—visiting hospitals around the globe.

EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND

Patricia Benner earned her Bachelor’s degree in Nursing at Pasadena City College in 1964. She
obtained her Master’s degree specializing in Medical-Surgical Nursing in 1970 at the University
of California Berkeley.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER

After she completed her doctorate degree in 1982 at the same university, she became an associate

professor in the Department of Physiological Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. She is now a tenured professor and teaches philosophy of nursing science, ethics and interpretive phenomenology. When she moved into the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences as a professor in the same university, she was the first person to occupy the Thelma Schobe Cook Endowed Chair in ethics and spirituality. She is known as a great lecture in the topics of health, stress and coping, ethics, and skill acquisition. She is also the Chief Faculty Development Officer for EducatingNurses.com and a noted author of From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Nursing Practice. She is also the Director of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching National Nursing Education Study, which is the first of its kind in 40 years. She furthermore collaborated with the Carnegie Preparation for the Professions studies of Clergy, Engineering, Law and Medicine. In addition, Dr. Benner is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. She was elected as an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Nursing. She later founded Benner Associates,

which aims to put in place a set of solutions to the many of the problems faced by the nursing

profession in the present environment.

MAIN CONTRIBUTION TO NURSING

Some of Dr. Benner’s influences in nursing is Virginia Henderson, and Hubert and Stuart

Dreyfus—who were professors at the University of California at Berkeley and founders of

the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition. She gained inspiration of her theory: novice to expert

from Dreyfus model. The Dreyfus model was initially made to study the performance of chess

players because the Dreyfus brothers believed in learning through experience and that learning

was situation-based wherein a student had to undergo five stages in learning to proceed from novice to expert. Dr. Benner realized that such situations are also similar with what is happening in nursing, where expertise highly depended on experience and knowledge, and acquiring and developing those

skills was a long and enduring process. She found that when nurses were exposed to different varying situations; they learn from those experience and develop some skills of involvement from those circumstances with their patients and family.

BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS

Dr. Patricia Benner is internationally known as a highly acclaimed author, researcher and lecturer on health and ethics. Her work has brought great influence to clinical practice and ethics. She has been engaged in more than 50 doctoral dissertations and pioneered the use of interpretive phenomenology—an method to psychological qualitative research that intends to understand how a certain person in a given context makes use of a given phenomenon—in nursing. Among all the books she has authored, she is most well-known for her work “From Novice to Expert”. In 1984, the book earned the American Journal of Nursing & Book of the Year for nursing research and education. Alongside Judith Wrubel, she also co-authored The Primacy of Caring which was also awarded named Book of the Year in 1990. This is still being used up to today and has been translated into eight languages. Another notable work of hers is the book Expertise in Nursing Practice: Caring, Clinical Judgment, and Ethics with co-authors Christine Tanner, Suzanne Gordon. This was also named Book of the Year in 1996. The book is a result of a six-year study of on the work of critical care nurses in over 130 hospitals. Expertise in nursing practice is clearly defined in the book which makes it an excellent and practical resource for nurses to expand their knowledge and hone their clinical skills in order to become successful in the nursing practice. She has other books which she co-authored including “The Crisis of Care” with Susan Philipps, “Caregiving” with Suzanne Gordon and Neil Nottingham, published in 1996 and & Clinical Wisdom and Interventions in Critical Care: A Thinking–In–Action Approach with co-authors Pat Hooper-Kyriakidis and Daphne Stannard.

AWARDS

With the fountain of knowledge her books have contributed to the practice of nursing, she

received the Book of The Year Award from The American Journal of Nursing (AJN) for four

times: in 1984,1990, 1996 and 2000. She also was also awarded the Linda Richards Award for Leadership in Education in 1989, and Excellence in Nursing Research/Education Award in 1990.

Dr. Patricia Benner was also named as one of the American Academy of Nursing’s “Living

Legends”. It was stated by Catherine Lynch Gilliss, PhD, R.N., FAAN, former President (2009-

2011) of the American Academy of Nursing and the Dean at the Duke University School of

Nursing that Dr. Benner's contributions to the field of nursing included: articulating knowledge

embedded in nursing practice, skill acquisition, clinical reasoning, and the ethics of care.

REFERENCES

Benner’s From Novice to Expert. (n.d.). Retrieved September 24, 2019, from Nursing Theory
website: http://nursing-theory.org/theories-and-models/from-novice-to-expert.php
Biography of Patricia Benner. (n.d.). Retrieved September 24, 2019, from Educating Nurses
website: https://www.educatingnurses.com/biography-of-patricia-benner/
Hunt, C. (n.d.). LibGuides: Nurse Theorists & Nursing Theories: Patricia Benner. Retrieved
September 24, 2019, from //goodwin.libguides.com/c.php?g=305482&p=2037986
Patricia Benner—Nursing Theorist. (2014, May 12). Retrieved September 24, 2019, from
RealityRN website: http://www.realityrn.com/blogroll/patricia-benner-nursing-theorist/7580/
Patricia Benner—Nursing Theorist. (n.d.). Retrieved September 24, 2019, from
http://www.whyiwanttobeanurse.org/nursing-theorists/patricia-benner.php
Patricia E. Benner. (n.d.). Retrieved September 24, 2019, from Center for Health Journalism
website: https://www.centerforhealthjournalism.org/resources/sources/patricia-e-benner